The findings of the study in Chapter 2: Analysis of adaptation policies for vulnerable sectors be summarised as follows (see also table on the right): • None of the South Caucasus countries have specially designated legal acts on climate change (neither on mitigation nor on adaptation); • All the countries made commitments to elaborate NAPAs or National Adaptation Strategies; • Development strategies and programmes of the all countries in most cases, refer to climate vulnerability; however, they do not consider tangible adaptation measures; • Environmental sectoral policy documents at best have references to vulnerability to climate and propose particular adaptation actions; especially in biodiversity and forestry sectors. Moreover, these two sectors do refer to mountain region/ ecosystem vulnerability to climate change; • Agricultural policies of the all three countries consider the need to increase the resilience of the sector to climate change; • Most of other sectoral policy documents do not consider climate change adaptation as a priority; however, some of them consider climate change mitigation actions, e.g. in the energy sector; • Most of the countries do not have specially designed financial mechanisms for adaptation, besides national budgetary and international funds; • Most of the countries do have specific national coordination mechanisms; • All the countries share similar approaches to stakeholder consultations, mostly defined by provisions within the Aarhus Convention on public participation; • In all three countries the designated authority for development and planning of adaptation actions is the ministry for the environment. But it is worth noting that these agencies do not have sufficient capacity, especially for development of methodologies and conducting monitoring and evaluation. • All of the countries share a similar approach to monitoring and evaluation of progress, i.e. through National Communications to the UNFCCC, and none of them have nationally adopted comprehensive all-inclusive universal instruments for this purpose; • Another common trend for all countries is consideration of mountain and high mountain regions in social rather than an economic context; very few strategies and policy documents refer to mountain region/ecosystem vulnerability and/or propose special actions to increase their resilience to climate change. Those documents that do, relate to forestry resilience and biodiversity.

Year: 2015

From collection: Outlook on Climate Change Adaptation in the South Caucasus Mountains

Cartographer: GRID-Arendal/Manana Kurtubadze