As an integral part of the CCRD project, USAID's Global Climate Change Office has released its new climate resilient development framework, entitled:

"Climate-Resilient Development: A Framework for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change"

Climate change is one of many challenges developing countries must recognize and respond to in planning for the future. By increasing risks to human health, welfare, and ecosystems, climate impacts can threaten primary development goals such as reducing poverty, increasing access to education, improving child health, combating disease, or managing natural resources sustainably. 

This guide presents a framework for the systematic inclusion of climate considerations in development decision-making. The framework’s objective is to support the development process by assisting development practitioners in identifying, evaluating, selecting, implementing, and adjusting actions to reduce climate vulnerabilities and improve development outcomes. The climate-resilient development framework described here is designed to promote actions that ensure progress toward development goals by including climate stressors, both climate variability and climate change.

Working with decision makers in governments and across sectors, the framework has been applied in Barbados, Jamaica, Nepal, Peru, Philippines, St. Lucia, Tanzania, West Africa, and other countries that are preparing communities for a climate resilient future. The framework describes USAID's “development-first” approach, which aims to achieve development goals despite climate change. This framework is an update of the approach presented in 2007 in USAID’s Adapting to Climate Variability and Change: A Guidance Manual for Development Planning.