Community based climate change adaptation (CBA)

Community based adaptation is an approach that puts people in the centre of their own development, by facilitating a learning process that increases resilience and anticipatory capacity. Adaptation is place-based and requires specific strategies. In order to create an enabling environment for adaptation it is important to firstly create the determination to adapt, and secondly create cooperation and networks to foster adaptation processes. The Adaptation and beyond newsletter for participatory research is published by Indigo Development & Change as a contribution towards effective and participatory adaptation to climate change, providing a forum for case studies and community and researcher feedback

South African National Networking Meeting on Climate Change Adaptation, the Airport Grand Hotel, Johannesburg, 18 June 2009

The workshop explored the need for a specific structure to facilitate the process of sharing experiences and improving practice, through enhanced communication and co-ordination, to increase support for affected communities (including the community of adaptation practitioners) in order to respond effectively to climate change. Participants identified gaps and shortcomings in adaptation to climate change in South Africa including institutional problems, a rural bias, and data gaps. A task team will help create a representative network of adaptation workers, and establish strategic links to draw in those already involved in climate change adaptation, towards building a network of networks

Vulnerability Assessments, Identity and Spatial Scale Challenges in Disaster-Risk Reduction

Current approaches to vulnerability assessment for disaster-risk reduction (DRR) commonly apply generalised, a priori determinants of vulnerability to particular hazards in particular places. Although they may allow for policy-level legibility at high levels of spatial scale, these approaches suffer from attribution problems that become more acute as the level of analysis is localised and the population under investigation experiences greater vulnerability. In this article, we locate the source of this problem in a spatial scale mismatch between the essentialist framings of identity behind these generalised determinants of vulnerability and the intersectional, situational character of identity in the places where DRR interventions are designed and implemented. Using the Livelihoods as Intimate Government (LIG) approach to identify and understand different vulnerabilities to flooding in a community in southern Zambia, we empirically demonstrate how essentialist framings of identity produce this mismatch. Further, we illustrate a means of operationalising intersectional, situational framings of identity to achieve greater and more productive understandings of hazard vulnerability than available through the application of general determinants of vulnerability to specific places and cases

International Conference on Climate Risk Management, inputs for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report

In April 2017, over 70 scientists, policymakers and practitioners from 32 countries convened at the International Conference on Climate Risk Management in Nairobi, Kenya. This conference utilized innovative approaches to facilitate a process of constructive, critical reflection of the existing climate risk management knowledge base, as well as its relevance to decision-maker needs and views of the most vulnerable people. The conference articulated recommendations to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the development of their Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)–in support of the Chair’s vision for AR6 to have a strong focus on solutions. This report highlights key recommendations distilled from these discussions in areas such as risk-framing approaches and risk metrics. The meeting also suggested that the next IPCC assessment could be strengthened by stronger interaction with practitioners and policymakers working at the forefront of implementing global climate and development agreements, especially in the most vulnerable contexts, and identified associated research priorities. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Supporting Climate-Resilient Urban Planning: 10 Lessons from Cities in Southern Africa

This brief presents key insights on integrating climate information into climate change-related adaptation planning in African cities. The projects – FRACTAL (Future Resilience for African CiTies And Lands) and its successor, FRACTAL-Plus – took place over a seven-year period (2015-2022) in nine cities in sub-Saharan Africa.1 Here we present 10 lessons learned through the projects, providing examples of key elements that can support long-term, transformational action to build climate resilience (McClure et al., in review)

Convection permitting regional climate change simulations for understanding future climate and informing decision making in Africa

Pan-Africa convection-permitting regional climate model simulations have been performed to study the impact of high resolution and the explicit representation of atmospheric moist convection on the present and future climate of Africa. These unique simulations have allowed European and African climate scientists to understand the critical role that the representation of convection plays in the ability of a contemporary climate model to capture climate and climate change, including many impact relevant aspects such as rainfall variability and extremes. There are significant improvements in not only the small-scale characteristics of rainfall such as its intensity and diurnal cycle, but also in the large-scale circulation. Similarly effects of explicit convection affect not only projected changes in rainfall extremes, dry-spells and high winds, but also continental-scale circulation and regional rainfall accumulations. The physics underlying such differences are in many cases expected to be relevant to all models that use parameterized convection. In some cases physical understanding of small-scale change mean that we can provide regional decision makers with new scales of information across a range of sectors. We demonstrate the potential value of these simulations both as scientific tools to increase climate process understanding and, when used with other models, for direct user applications. We describe how these ground-breaking simulations have been achieved under the UK Government’s Future Climate for Africa Programme. We anticipate a growing number of such simulations, which we advocate should become a routine component of climate projection, and encourage international co-ordination of such computationally, and human-resource expensive simulations as effectively as possible