A two-day workshop on Stocktaking for Sub-National Adaptation Planning (SSNAP) for Climate Change in Uttarakhand will begin at the Wildlife Institute of India on Wednesday. While principal chief conservator of forests Dr Srikant Chandola will inaugurate the workshop, principal secretary, Forests, Dr Ranbir Singh will the chief guest on the concluding day of the workshop.
Organised by the Uttarakhand Forest Department with support from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), the workshop is being conducted in partnership with Acclimatise, the Central Himalayan Environment Association (CHEA), and the Wildlife Institute of India. According to the State forest department, two years after the June 2013 disaster in Uttarakhand and with three months to go before the key UN-led climate conference in Paris, the SSNAP workshop aims to dwell on what the government and non-Government stakeholders planning and advising Uttarakhand in its development agenda, have to say about climate change in Uttarakhand and policy efforts to address it.
The workshop is aimed at assessing Uttarakhand’s current needs and capacities to manage climate change. The project is part of a larger effort in the State to adapt to climate change by identifying current climate risks, determining options for building resilience, prioritising adaptation and resilience projects, and identifying sources of available global and national finance which can support the implementation of adaptation actions as ex-pressed in Uttarakhand Action Plan on Climate Change .
Uttarakhand is vulnerable to the impacts of climate variability and change, a fact that has become increasingly clear with recent episodes of floods and droughts that have put pressure on current development efforts in the State. Such changes pose significant risks to lives and livelihoods, highlighted particularly by the devastating floods of June 2013. The UAPCC sets out ways to minimise the impacts of climate change in the state. And a process is currently underway to assess the social and climatic vulnerability and risk of the State to serve as a basis for prioritising climate adaptation actions. According to the department, the SSNAP tool is intended to capture the perceptions of government and non-Government decision makers who are involved in State’s planning process.
Recognising that climate change is a crosscutting issue and that decision-making is undertaken by many different actors, officials from key sectors, research and scientific institutions, civil society organisations and industry bodies will be participating in the SSNAP workshop.
SSNAP, a derivative of a tool developed by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), is intended to provide a snapshot of the currently available and intended planning capacities in Uttarakhand, so as to provide a common understanding and starting point for taking action to implement the UAPCC.