Identifying Opportunities & Assessing Vulnerability: Essential Characteristics of Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments

By Eliot Levine, WWF-US

@ 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 [...]

A New Year’s Resolution for Everyone: Developing Useful Adaptation Case Studies

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 [...]

Igniting the Fuse (part 2): Lessons Learned from Designing Adaptation Trainings

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 [...]

Safe Islands in an Ocean of Trouble: Adaptation in the Maldives

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 [...]

Igniting the Fuse: Raising Awareness and Countering Common Misperceptions on Adaptation

By Shaun Martin, WWF-US

Two participants work together at an adaptation training in Madagascar © Shaun Martin

At a recent gathering of 200 conservationists, a speaker asked her audience to identify which of the following activities were examples of “adaptation,” – restoring mangroves, removing dams, introducing new crops, building corridors, or promoting community forestry. Almost [...]

Home on the Range? Planning for Change on the Prairies

By Anne Schrag, WWF-US

Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan ©Troy Fleece

In April, I was stymied by a late-season blizzard; in mid-June, extreme flooding washed out a section of Trans-Canada Highway.  Finally, in late June I was able to make the drive from our Bozeman, Montana field office to Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan to lead a planning [...]

Building Mangrove Resilience

Community members, Fiji © Joanna Ellison

by Jonathan Cook, WWF-US

Community members, Fiji © Joanna Ellison

For the past six months, I have managed a WWF project, supported by the Global Environment Facility and United Nations Environment Program, that tries to address the significant adaptation challenges facing a fascinating but often neglected ecosystem: mangrove forests. Mangroves – the guardians of tropical [...]