Improving Co-benefits and 'Triple Win' Impacts from Climate Action: The Role of Guidance Tools

This CDI Practice Paper by L.O. Naess, M. Hagemann, B. Harvey, F. Urban, S. Hendel-Blackford and N. Höhne addresses the role of tools in supporting interventions to achieve the ‘triple wins’ of adaptation, mitigation and development. Over recent years there has been a proliferation of guidance tools to support adaptation or mitigation, increasingly in a development context, but little work on the role tools play in helping to bridge the gap between these three areas in practice. Based on a review of tools in view of ‘climate compatible development’, the paper suggests key considerations for how tools could help achieve ‘triple wins’. They include (1) the importance of understanding how tools are a way of defining and shaping a goal, not merely helping to implement actions to achieve it; (2) the value of acknowledging different starting points, and that a lot of the integration is happening – and will continue to happen – on the side of users; and (3) because tools cannot provide all the answers to complex problems they need to be complemented by analysis of actors, goals and outcomes.