Inter-American Development Bank Group Climate Change Action Plan 2021-2025

The Climate Change Action Plan describes the IDB Groups progress since 2016 to support the regions need for low-carbon and climate-resilient development finance and its plan to raise climate ambition continuously in the region. The Second Update to the Institutional Strategy specifies that cross cutting issues, including climate change, continue to hamper development and that the IDB Group will renew its commitment to address them. The climate-finance goal set in the Bahamas Resolution has been extended through its inclusion in the IDB Group Corporate Results Framework 2020- 2023 (CRF 20202023).5 At the same time, all MDBs have committed to complement tracking of their financial contributions to climate action with a new approach focused on the consistency of their support with long-term decarbonization and climate resilience efforts. To this end, MDBs have outlined a common approach to support countries to deliver on their commitments under the PA. There has also been increasing recognition of the need to measure the results of the IDB Groups climate action and the complexity it entails.

Climate change and the water–energy nexus: an urban challenge

Economic growth, often based on industrial development, together with increased human settlements on urban land, has caused the spread of cities and has increased water demand and/or consumption and water withdrawals for energy generation. In a world of increasing climate change, governments and societies have to build resilience strategies, notably for cities. This paper develops a conceptual framework based on the Driving force-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) model specially tailored to the water–energy nexus at the urban scale. From a policy perspective, my assumption is that this framework can serve as a benchmark to verify and build the effectiveness of climate change action plans designed for cities. In order to test the applicability of the framework developed, this paper presents the components of the proposed DPSIR and related research questions to examine the climate change action plan of New York City, one of the most populated megacities in the world.