Africa: No One-Size-Fits-All Solution for Climate Adaptation in Africa
Cape Town — Adaptation Futures 2018 – one of the largest gatherings of climate scientists, practitioners and business leaders has taken place for the first time on the African continent with the goal of highlighting challenges faced by the global south in dealing with climate impacts. allAfricacaught up with the International Development Research Centre’s Georgina Cunhill Kemp to hear her thoughts.
What you are working on at the moment?
I’m a senior programme officer in the climate change programme which falls within our agriculture and environment programme and I specifically work on the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA).
This is a seven-year partnership programme between the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Department for International Development in the UK DFID, and what we’ve been trying to do through that programme is support research in climate change hot spots. Climate change hot spots are parts of the world where we see high climate signals, places like delta regions which are exposed to sea level rise, glacier-fed river systems that are heavily impacted by glacial retreat and semi-arid regions that have high variability of rainfall.
But a climate change hotspot is a region that also has high concentrations of particularly vulnerable people with potentially limited capacity to adapt and we’re trying to support evidence-based decision-making that supports the resilience of the most vulnerable. So we have supported four consortia that work across three of these hotspots and we’re at the end of that program now it closes down for the IDRC in April 2019 and for the projects themselves, they’re all coming to an end in about November this year.
So we were at Adaptation Futures presenting quite a bit of that work and we had more than 20 special sessions put in by the CARIAA consortium and more than 50 presentations made by both researchers and practitioners in the network.
So what’s interesting about CARRIA is that we haven’t just funded researchers to do this work. What we’ve done is funded quite innovative, what we call transdisciplinary networks, which are essentially partnerships between NGOs and researchers at multiple scales to try and find solutions to some of the challenges experienced by communities in these climate change hotspots.
