Impacts related to climate change are already being felt worldwide: Extreme weather conditions such as strong rains and floods caused by tropical rains and cyclones or persistant heat periods leading to droughts will affect developing countries severely. Furthermore, developing country emissions are increasing rapidly and are going to surpass the industrialized country emissions in the medium term. This will accelerate climate change even further.

Consequently the number of programmes of development cooperation dealing with mitigation of greenhouse gases and adaptation to climate change is increasing. Nevertheless, single standing projects alone will not be adequate given the dimension of the challenge at hand. The integration of climate change aspects into all relevant current and future activities of development cooperation is needed.

To this end, GTZ is currently developing methods and recommendations. One important element of this effort is the "Climate Check", which tackles climate change issues from two angles:

• "Climate Proofing" deals with the impact climate change risks can have on the sustainability of development projects.
• "Emission Saving" identifies contributions of the cooperation programmes to mitigating climate change and helps maximise these contributions.