Resilience of rural communities to climatic accidents: a need to scale up socio-environmental safety nets (Madagascar, Haiti)

Lack of resilience to climatic accidents seems to be one of the main reasons for the transformation of climatic accidents into environmental, economic and social disasters for rural communities.&nbsp;Focusing particularly on Madagascar and Haiti, the recommendations in this policy brief target ways to increase and improve the coverage and impact of existing risk management tools, as well as making proposals for new tools. The authors argue that in poor and disaster-prone countries like Madagascar or Haiti, development assistance must seek to reduce disaster-related risk in order to achieve lasting improvements.&nbsp;In particular the paper looks at:<br /> management of crises and climatic accidents in rural areas vulnerability to climate change and resilience capacities resilience to climatic accidents in public works and safety-nets grassroots community development and scaling up.The brief makes the following observations: prevention and risk-management tools have to be integrated into already existing social safety-nets within the framework of food security and poverty reduction strategies the tools to strengthen safety-nets should include the mobilisation of permanent public works projects to maintain and develop rural infrastructure and production systems participation of the local workforce from the most vulnerable households will ensure a complementary function for the safety-net through the generation of non-agricultural income the carbon-binding potential of activities with such high labour intensity provides an opportunity for sustainable financing through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDG) sustainable financing can also be achieved through public funds which target climate change mitigation the creation of jobs whose obvious function is rural, environmental and natural resource management can also be addressed for the purpose of promoting rural resilience. <br />