Deadline: 28-Aug-23
Applications are now open for the iCARE Innovations Fund aims to ignite breakthroughs for climate resilience in South Asia by promoting innovation in data analytics, decision support systems, and standards building on Tech Emerge and Climate Innovations Challenge.
The fund will help in upscaling and co-creating innovations for climate adaptation, resilient infrastructure, and sectoral decision support systems for integrated water resources management and climate-smart agriculture.
Facilitating innovators to deploy technology and innovative solutions to enhance climate adaptation across different sectors and levels is part of a 5-year project called “Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CARE) for South Asia” funded by the World Bank.
The project aims to create an enabling environment for climate resilience in the region, focusing on Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan by improving the availability of regional data and knowledge, developing guidelines, tools, and capacities, and promoting climate-resilient decisions, policies, and investments across key sectors.
The Fund is supported by the World Bank under the Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CARE) for South Asia project and a total of US $ 2.5 million is made available to ADPC to identify, scale, and pilot innovations to reduce climate risk and build climate resilience of communities vulnerable to such risks and extremes.
Objectives
- Promote innovation and co-creation in climate resilience data and analytics.
- Foster innovation in decision-support systems for climate resilience.
- Enable innovations in climate resilience development in focused sectors.
What are the Thematic Areas?
- Climate Information and Analytics
- South Asian countries are seeking solutions that would combine weather-related data to generate understandable and usable information for policy interventions in specific sectors, such as food security, nutrition, forests and watersheds, livelihoods and resilient infrastructure needs, at local level.
- Specific areas:
- Use of drone technology for monitoring and analyzing local level hydrometeorological events
- Artificial Intelligence and related technologies to supplement climate models.
- High-resolution future climate projections for assessing future risk and understanding impact.
- Use of IOT (Internet of Things) for last mile communication for responding to climate-related disasters.
- Anticipatory action on early warning
- Early Warning Systems for All
- Early warnings on climate change impact which includes slow onset changes and shifts in climate such as precipitation and temperature patterns, as well as degradation in ecosystem and resource quality, is rarely understood, collected or shared with all. Intrinsic to this problem is the lack of monitoring, collecting and sharing information locally and feeding to the decision-making and scientific knowledge to respond to early warnings.
- Specific areas:
- Translating climate science to useable information for all including local administration and communities through interactive Decision Support System
- Tools for last mile connectivity, communication, dissemination, and local actions
- Citizen science and crowdsourcing for climate-induced hazard early warning system
- Early warning systems with alternate mobile technology
- Climate-Smart Agriculture
- Countries are seeking solutions to make agroforestry, agriculture and aquaculture more resilient to the deleterious effects of climate change while trying to promote adaptations that enhance food and nutrition security while protecting the environment.
- Specific areas:
- Measuring climate extremes and impacts on crop yields
- Leveraging indigenous knowledge, integrating with technology (real time early warning) to adopt community-level smart agriculture practices
- Farming technology interventions (Agroforestry; Sloping Agriculture Land Technology (SALT); Integrated pest management; Greenhouse farming)
- Digital agriculture – Tailored climate-informed advisories to enhance production and resilience of small-holder farmers engaged in activities related to agriculture, livestock, and dairy
- Integrated Water Resources Management
- In most countries, climate change leads to both an increased flood risk and prevalence of drought. Basic systems for watershed protection, water management, flood management will be required to make countries and communities more resilient.
- Specific areas:
- Crop Water Requirement and Water Quota Allocation Tool
- Use of satellite data for water resource observation and management
- Water accounting systems: Using AI and state-of-the-art technologies to obtain robust estimates of water use.
- Smart water allocation system at watershed scale / river basin scale
- Use of Latest Remote Sensing (RS) Technology to measure Evapotranspiration.
- Solutions enhancing integration of social and economic components of the IWRM.
- Reduction of chemical contamination by promotion of chemical and insecticide-free agriculture practices
- Resilient Infrastructure
- There is an equal need to build infrastructure that is more resilient and can withstand the increasing frequency of these events. For example, in the immediate aftermath of a climate event, emergency operations are often hampered by a lack of resilient infrastructure.
- Specific areas:
- Remote and smart monitoring of transport infrastructure health, e.g., sensors, drones, CCTV
- Climate-resilient roads, bioengineering, slope stabilization structures, side drainage and cross drainage structures, super-elevation
- Climate-resilient roofing, irrigation systems, bridges (site, elevation, abutment & reinforcement), perforated surface for surface water management in built environments
- Climate- and disaster-resilient infrastructure design practices
- Effective Investments in Climate Adaptation
- As climate change impact on multiple sectors at a regional as well as country and community levels increase, economic losses have undermined development outcomes annually. The need for new and innovative climate risk financing measures, models, approaches and instruments are more pronounced than ever before. However, limited access to and awareness on climate risk financing in the SAR countries have impeded the region from adopting cost-efficient and affordable mechanisms.
- Specific areas:
- Satellite applications for parametric insurance derivation
- Scaling up financing for climate change adaptation in agriculture
- Weather index-based agricultural insurance for South Asian countries
- Modeling approaches for Forecast-based Financing (FbF), for supporting risk financing and risk-informed early action protocols (REAP)
- Debt for Nature Swaps – Green and Blue Bonds
- Tool for Quantification of Contingent Liabilities
Funding Information
- Grant amount per proposal/project: Up to USD 100,000.
- Number of projects to be supported: 08-10
- Total grant fund available for all projects: USD 1 Million
- Project duration: 15 months
Geographic Scope: South Asia Region countries
Eligibility Criteria
- Relevant Areas: Disruptive and Innovative Solutions for Climate Adaptation and Resilience in the key focused sectors of Climate information and analytics; Early Warning System for All; Integrated Water Resources Management; Climate Smart Agriculture; Resilient Infrastructure; and Effective investments in climate adaptation.
- Eligible entities: INGOs, CSOs, NGOs, Public and Private Sector entities, including academia and consortia.
For more information, visit Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC).