GAIN Index, a tool to help prioritize adaptation investment, to be presented Wednesday at USAID

WASHINGTON, June 26, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Global Adaptation Institute (GAIN) Founding CEO Dr. Juan Jose Daboub will present the GAIN Index at a meeting at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on Wednesday. The GAIN Index ranks 161 countries in terms of vulnerability and readiness to adapt to global challenges such as climate change.

"This navigation tool is used to help prioritize investment in adaptation, which is urgently needed to build resilience for some of the world's most vulnerable," said Dr. Daboub. "The GAIN Index has been presented to high-level groups around the world including most recently at Rio+20 in Brazil. Feedback has been positive and many have expressed excitement for the release of the GAIN Index 2012 this fall."

In his presentation, Dr. Daboub will focus on the opportunities in adaptation and the need for private sector investment to make the greatest impact. To give perspective on the urgent need to adapt, a minimum of $70 billion per year by 2020 and up to $100 billion per year by 2050 will be needed to pay for adaptation, according to the World Bank report "The Economics of Adaptation". The public sector must provide an enabled environment for private sector investment, as resources are likely to originate mostly from private sector funding. Allocation from the public sector is estimated at a projection of less than 1 percent.

A few of the overarching themes of the GAIN Index include:

• The vast majority of countries in the world offer plenty of opportunities for investment in adaptation. 86 percent of countries score above the middle score in the economic readiness scale. 75 percent of countries score better than the middle score in governance and in social readiness.
• 90 percent of countries in the Americas have improved their average readiness in the past 15 years. That is 29 countries out of 32. 
• To compare investment opportunities among the countries, we have evaluated countries' improvements in adaptation relative to other countries of similar wealth (measured in GDP per capita). We have found that:
  • From 1995 to 2010, 68 out of 175 countries have consistently shown better-than-expected achievements in adaptation than other countries of comparable wealth.
  • Of those 68 countries, 29 are in Europe, 15 are in Asia, 13 are in Africa, 10 in the Americas, and 1 in the Middle East.
  • Another 37 countries have achieved better than expected results in adaptation than countries of comparable wealth in most of the 16 years of study.

The Global Adaptation Institute (GAIN) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)3 organization guided by a vision of building resilience to climate change and other global forces as a key component to sustainable development. Please visit us at: gain.org.

SOURCE Global Adaptation Institute (GAIN)

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