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The Andean countries ideally ought to address both
climatic variability – such as seasonal and year-to-
year variability, and both slow and fast onset events
of climate change. With regards to climate change,
fast onsets of climate change encompassing extreme
events and most disasters events find themselves
more on the government radar than slow onset
events, because of their short-term nature. Slow
onset events, such as longer droughts or the loss of
soil moisture, do not impact in a short time frame
and are therefore more difficult to grasp. Moreover,
these impacts may occur over a longer time frame
than the political cycles; thus, actions to address
climate change may not render political benefits in
the short term or contribute to re-election.
Health policies exemplify the dynamics of the
temporal perspective and the need for a long-term
perspective. For example, Colombian health care
policies are forward-looking because they are focused
on the impacts of disasters on health (short term),
while assessing the interactions between changing
climate and vector-borne diseases (midterm) and
expanding the coverage of the health system to
include diseases related to climate change (long
term) (McMichael et al., 2006).
In general, the lack of performance indicators in policies
makes it impossible to assess their efficiency and
effectiveness. Nonetheless, some adaptation policies
in the analysed Andean countries have set adaptation
goals and targets, showing some rather slow progress.
The national and sectoral policies that have been
analysed in this report do not specifically include
Are the responses forward-looking?
adaptation measures on mountains. Moreover,
existing policies do not fully integrate flexible
approaches such as resilience and adaptive systems,
which would increase the countries’ capacity for
responding to climate change. However, climate
variability and socioeconomic impacts are
acknowledged through responses to extreme weather
events. The governments’ disaster risk management
offices usually lead these responses, though they are
implemented with the sectors mainly through special
programmes due to the emergent nature of the event.
Policies vary between countries and also between
sectors (within a country), though some patterns
are worth mentioning. IWRM is a fairly common
approach in the countries of our study and can
be seen as forward-looking because it aims to
integrate different water uses by considering
the water flows needed by the ecosystem (for a
critical perspective on IWRM see Boelens, 2008).
Although IWRM may not specifically address
mountains, these ecosystems are considered crucial
for the functioning of and service provision in the
Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City of Colombia