By Shaun Martin, WWF-US
 © Michel Gunther / WWF-Canon It can be challenging to find climate change adaptation resources that explain complex concepts to lay audiences in easy-to-understand language. Academic journal articles, project case studies, vulnerability assessments, and the like often speak to the experts rather than newcomers. Providing these types of documents to those new to the field is like asking them to watch a mystery movie one hour after it started – they might catch on eventually, but chances are they will leave the cinema confused and frustrated.
Thankfully there are a number of resources out there that are appropriate for those who are relatively new to adaptation. Here are a few that I have found particularly useful and always include in the bundle of pdf’s that I distribute to our workshop participants. All are available free of charge online.
Continue reading
By Jessica Frank, Twin
 Member of the Gumutindo Cooperative © Jessica Frank Twin works in partnership with over 50 farmer organisations world wide, facilitating market access and helping to build business and organisational capacity. We are currently developing our strategy to support smallholder producer organisations to effectively plan adaptation interventions with their members; an initial project with Gumutindo Coffee Cooperative Enterprises in Uganda is already underway.
Gumutindo: Climate Change is Here Now.
Members of Gumutindo Cooperative live in the upland valleys of Mount Elgon, where they produce high quality organic and Fairtrade certified coffee. Climate change presents a serious threat to smallholder coffee farmers since coffee trees are highly vulnerable to changes in their environment and only thrive within a narrow temperature range and under the right rainfall conditions. In Uganda, coffee farmers are extremely worried about the future since they are already suffering from increased climate variability including longer drought periods and heavier rainfall leading to poor quality cherry, low yields and severe erosion. In March 2010 following extremely heavy rains, a devastating landslide killed over 300 people that live and farm on Mount Elgon. This season farmers suffered from an unusually long drought season and extremely late rains, threatening food security.
Continue reading
By Geoff Barnard, Climate and Development Knowledge Network
 Gaining perspective on climate knowledge portals ©Tim Woods, Green Ink. The symptoms are familiar. You seem to hear about a new climate information portal or knowledge platform being launched every week. You check it out and it seems impressive at first glance. Nice graphics. Promising headings. Ambitious objectives. Cool tools.
But as you click further you start to wonder. How’s this different from that portal you heard about last week? Or that big World Bank one (or was it UN) that’s been around for a few years? Which one is more useful for me, and how are they different? How can I make sure I’m getting the best information? There’s so many out there, how can I make sense of them? And which one would I recommend to my developing country partner with a patchy internet connection and not a lot of time to play with?
Let’s call it Portal proliferation Syndrome or PPS, because along with this syndrome you tend to get APS (Acronym Proliferation Syndrome). It’s widespread, and it’s becoming increasingly global as more countries start thinking about how to get to grips with climate change, and more organisations and donors pick up on the climate issue.
Continue reading
 @ R.Isotti, A.Cambone - Homo Ambiens / WWF-Canon Last August I found myself in a dark room at a conference facility outside of Delhi, listening to what was meant to be an adaptation talk. The speaker was supposed to be walking us through adaptation options for conservationists and natural resource planners in India, but with only 15 minutes left in his hour-long talk, I had yet to even hear the word “adaptation” mentioned. Which is maybe why one nervous looking individual crept up to an open chair next to me, sat down, and started drawing a map on the back of his workshop agenda. When he was done he tapped me on the shoulder and (in a whisper) started to tell me the story of the fishery he had just finished labeling on the map. The story he told was definitely troubling. This particular fishery that his work has been focusing on, and that thousands of people rely upon was seeing a significant decline in productivity. Looking up from the map he said “I believe this is because of climate change… so what should we do?” Smiling, he handed me his pen and awaited my answer. My response was unsurprisingly unsatisfying- “Have you and your colleagues though about doing a vulnerability assessment?” I asked.
Continue reading
By Carina Bachofen
 Three Bengali women in Dhaka. By Ahron de Leeuw via Wikimedia Commons Last year marked the three-year anniversary of Cyclone Sidr, which ravaged the southern coast of Bangladesh and claimed the lives of 3,500 people. Loss of life was exacerbated by loss of development potential as the fierce storm decimated the mud and thatch homes of countless families, destroyed key infrastructure, and damaged productive land, leaving millions of poor individuals more vulnerable to climate change than ever before. In the wake of Cyclone Sidr, questions were raised about how to build resilience to climate change without compromising national development goals. So now, more than three years later, is Bangladesh developing differently? What lessons can be learned from the Bangladeshi experience to reframe development and climate action as mutually supportive objectives?
One can consider these questions and measure development progress from several angles. As climate change affects men and women differently, understanding the gender dimensions of climate change can provide valuable clues for designing development interventions that build resilience to climate impacts, and are effective and equitable for all.
Continue reading
By Eliot Levine, WWF-US
 ©Martin Harvey, WWF “How is climate adaptation work different than what I have been doing?” This is the number one question I hear as a member of the adaptation team here at WWF-US. From San Francisco to Nairobi to Hanoi, it’s everyone’s first question at the beginning of a meeting or at a start of a workshop. It’s also the trickiest to answer. So ok, here is the answer: Adaptation is a means, not an end.
Everything clear now? Are we all ready to begin adapting?
I didn’t think so…
That’s because adaptation work is all about context, and as such my very general answer is really not that helpful. However, at the risk of sounding like a know-it-all, I think that this key concept, that adaption is not about what you do but why and how you do it, is something that many people need to absorb if they are going to successfully integrate adaptation into their work. Sure, it doesn’t provide any of the conservationists I have met around the world with the strategies needed to protect a particular species, but it does answer the question.
For the sake of illustration let’s consider two different conservation planning scenarios:
Continue reading
By Shaun Martin, WWF-US
 Workshop Participants in Kota Kinabalu ©Shaun Martin I don’t know about you, but I have had my fill of boring PowerPoint presentations that have little relevance to my work. I just can’t take it anymore – and that’s unfortunate, because recently I am listening to a lot of presentations. So in 2011, I have decided to do something about this. I am encouraging everyone I know to take a fresh approach to how talk about their adaptation work. Are you with me?
Everyone wants to learn from “case studies” (a term I have learned to hate almost as much as “tools”). Our workshop participants want to see real-life examples of adaptation. Fair enough. But the problem comes in the delivery of these so-called case studies. Most presentations are designed with one purpose in mind – to let others know about the projects and programs we are working on and results achieved. This style of presentation is what I call an “information sharing” presentation. While information sharing may be useful in certain settings, this is typically not effective for an audience expecting to learn concepts and approaches applicable in their own work. When speaking to people who are who are new to adaptation, a “learning case study” is almost always more appropriate. More than simply telling others what you are doing, a learning oriented presentation provides useful insights that others can apply to their own work through the use of “lessons learned.”
Continue reading
By Shaun Martin, WWF-US
 Participants at a recent training in Vietnam ©Shaun Martin Ask anyone who has ever designed a training course and they will tell you that it’s always a good idea to conduct a needs assessment first. To create an effective training, one is told, you need to know your target audience inside and out. One must first determine how much your audience already knows and what they need to learn more about. Why then, doesn’t this work so well when designing an introductory climate change adaptation course? Read on and you’ll find out what I learned the hard way.
A little over a year ago, I was asked by my employer, WWF, to design and implement a climate change adaptation course for our staff. Having done this sort of thing over the past 20 years, I was relatively confident I could pull this off, even though I had very little background in adaptation. All I needed to do was follow best practices in training design, fill the syllabus with experts who understand adaptation, and presto! –a great course. Well, I was wrong. I wasn’t prepared for the special challenges that adaptation, as a very new field, poses for a training designer. I would like to share with you a few of the lessons I’ve learned that might be helpful to others who endeavor to develop an adaptation course of their own.
Lesson #1: People who do not clearly understand what adaptation is are not able to clearly articulate their training needs.
Continue reading
By Carina Bachofen and Edward Cameron
 Malé, capital of Maldives © Shahee Ilyas The Maldives is a country with many pseudonyms and identities. The great Venetian explorer Marco Polo referred to the Maldives as the “flower of the Indies”; to the scores of holidaymakers and honeymooners the island nation is popularly known as the “pearls of the Indian Ocean”. In recent years, as the grave threat of climate change has become more apparent, the Maldives has attracted a new identity – that of a nation facing an existential threat.
Vulnerability to climate change
In the short-term, the Maldives is already facing increasing exposure to extreme weather events such as sea-swells and coastal erosion, both of which damage homes, infrastructure and economic development. In the medium term, exposure to increasing CO2 deposits and warming of ocean temperatures threaten the prized coral reef system, exacerbating existing human impacts from fishing, construction, pollution and tourism. In the long-term the Maldives is facing an existential crisis. The majority of the one hundred and ninety inhabited islands in the archipelago lie less than one meter above sea level. According to IPCC scenarios sea-level rise by the end of the century could be as much as ninety centimeters. If this proves correct the nation would become uninhabitable.
Continue reading
By Carina Bachofen and Edward Cameron
 Indigenous farmer in Bolivia describes recent experiences with climate variability in the dry Altiplano region of Bolivia © Ana Bucher Speaking at the UN Climate Conference in Bali in December 2007, Al Gore quoted the Spanish poet Antonio Machado telling the assembled delegates, “Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.” The foundations for the path to climate change adaptation are built upon lessons learned from coping with climate variability in the past. Successful leaders in adaptation are those who create an enabling environment to construct this path.
Learning from the past
For hundreds of years, indigenous farmers in Bolivia have been using traditional knowledge to manage storms, droughts, floods and pests and to diversify food security. These hold tremendous potential to inspire, inform and complement the design of adaptation strategies for the future.
To prevent and cope with drought-related disasters, the Aymaran indigenous people have employed ancient engineering practices to harvest rainwater in the mountains and pampas by building small dams called qhuthañas. These dams collect and store rainwater for future use, freeing up time for women and children who may otherwise have to travel long distances to collect water. The qhuthañas also serve as a readily available source of clean water for local consumption, building resilience of local communities to cope with droughts over the long-term. Continue reading
|
|
Popular posts