Climate change is a defining challenge of our time. In our current era of polycrisis, its impacts are already derailing human development gains, as intensifying shocks expose and deepen existing poverty and vulnerabilities, drive inequality, and reshape the landscape of risk for millions of people around the world.
In this context, social protection provides a critical basis for public policy tools designed to reduce poverty, manage risk, and promote equity. Beyond that social protection systems are also uniquely positioned to protect livelihoods from both the immediate impacts of climate shocks and the longer-term vulnerabilities created by environmental stress. However, doing so effectively requires new thinking, better data, and integrated approaches that link climate adaptation and mitigation goals with the design, financing, and delivery of social protection.
To support this transformation, SPRI Global is organizing a 5-day training workshop on Climate Change and Social Protection. This interactive, pioneering course will help practitioners understand how social protection systems can be reimagined to address climate risks, support mitigation and adaptation, and contribute to just transitions
Find out more here.
Rethinking Risk in the Age of Climate Change
Social protection interventions have been fundamentally designed to help households and individuals to manage risks and to cope with shocks that negatively affect livelihoods. Traditionally, social protection systems have focused on addressing idiosyncratic shocks which occur across an individual’s lifecycle, such as job loss, illness, longevity or death. However, the increasing frequency and severity of covariate shocks, including natural disasters, pandemics, and economic crises that affect large populations simultaneously, have necessitated a shift toward more proactive and integrated approaches to social protection.
Climate change disrupts the livelihood of households directly in three interconnected ways:
- The compounding effects of climate change increase the severity of chronic stressors such as food insecurity or poor health.
- Climate change increases the frequency and intensity of disasters like floods, cyclones, and droughts.
- Climate change intensifies seasonal extremes, for example prolonging dry or rainy seasons.
Unlike individual or short-term shocks, climate change is a global phenomenon that affects entire countries, regions, and populations simultaneously. It not only increases the risk of monetary poverty of large parts of the world’s population, but also threatens the basic survival needs of these populations: access to food and water, safe shelter, and reliable infrastructure and energy. In extreme cases, climate impacts can render entire regions or even island nations uninhabitable, forcing large-scale displacement both within and across borders.
At the same time, the economic transition to low-carbon economies creates new “transition risks”: job losses in carbon-intensive sectors and higher prices for energy and transport. Together, these shocks can evolve into protracted crises, leaving millions vulnerable unless social protection systems evolve too.
From Responsive to Climate-Sensitive Social Protection
The scale and complexity of climate change-related threats is so encompassing that the traditional thinking around social protection is hardly sufficient to provide an effective conceptual framework. Traditional social protection systems mainly step in after shocks occur, through humanitarian relief or emergency cash transfers. But in a climate-stressed world, this is not enough.
Climate-Sensitive Social Protection (CSSP) expands the social protection agenda in two crucial ways:
- It looks beyond short-term shocks. Many communities face long-term processes that (slowly) change the livelihood of people making it more challenging or even impossible by drastically changing survival conditions . Examples include degraded soil, shifting rainfall patterns, or declining fish stocks.
- It connects social protection with climate action. Social protection responses and initiatives can play a role to mitigate climate change and to adapt to the changing livelihood conditions. For instance, cash-plus programmes can incentivize sustainable farming, and public works can support mangrove restoration.
This integrated approach bridges social protection, disaster risk management, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. When these systems work together, countries can better reduce exposure, strengthen adaptive capacity, and build long-term resilience.
The Social Protection System. The Social Protection Floor provides the foundation for universal and targeted support that reduces poverty and vulnerability. Climate-sensitive instruments build long-term resilience through adaptation and mitigation measures, while shock-responsive mechanisms provide rapid support during crises. Together, these components contribute to more inclusive and sustainable social protection systems in a changing climate.
From Concept to Action: A Glimpse from Indonesia
Building resilience in the face of climate change requires both mitigation and adaptation measures at the community, household, and individual levels. Developing an actionable programme involves a series of analytical and design steps: assessing climate-related risks and stressors, identifying vulnerable populations and their specific vulnerabilities, evaluating how local behaviours may exacerbate risks, determining whether existing social protection instruments can address these challenges, and designing new interventions that contribute to mitigation, adaptation, or both.
Indonesia offers a vivid example. In six provinces, more than 50 million people still rely on wood for cooking. The practice not only drives deforestation and air pollution but also exposes women and children to harmful smoke. Socially, activities like collecting wood and cooking on open fires is time-consuming and defines an important part of the household chores for women and children, lowering overall productivity in the economy.
A climate-sensitive social protection programme could support households to transition to cleaner fuels through cash-plus transfers, combining financial incentives with community training, cooking demonstrations, and small-business support for local stove producers, all while respecting the cultural and traditional significance of local food and cooking practices. This could result in lower carbon emissions, improved health, greater time savings for women, and stronger local economies. The same framework could be applied to water conservation, sustainable agriculture, or green jobs. This way, social protection can be a driver of both resilience and climate mitigation
Towards Climate-Sensitive Systems
We aim to illustrate that it is both necessary and possible to move beyond a responsive approach to shocks. Preventing and reducing risk exposure, as well as limiting the damage from slow-onset hazards and sudden shocks, requires building resilience and preparedness among the most vulnerable populations.
This shift has profound implications for how climate-sensitive social protection instruments are designed and aligned within broader systems.
Join our 5-day training on Climate Change and Social Protection to explore this transformation. Through interactive sessions, real-world case studies, and applied tools, participants learn to design how social protection systems can be reimagined to address climate risks, support mitigation and adaptation, and contribute to just transitions. Find out more here.