Integrating climate change analysis – the Christia... - Environment and adaptation to climate change ESRC_briefing_paper_1

Integrating climate change analysis – the Christian Aid

approach

More than half of Christian Aid’s programme funding supports livelihoods work and a substantial part

of this is directed towards reducing disaster risks. A major challenge has been to integrate climate

change adaptation, building on existing programme expertise and experience, rather than creating

another specialism.

The key to this has been establishing frameworks that use

existing tools wherever possible, explaining new concepts

where necessary and building these into one integrated

approach (see Figure 2). Central to this is a risk cycle

management approach to development planning, where

predictable risks are anticipated and long- and short-term

risk reduction activities are integrated into livelihood

development. In this way, time spent in emergency or

rehabilitation is minimized.

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Figure 2. Christian Aid’s framework for programme

responses

Coping and adaptation

The problem of how to deal with the risks related to both

variability and slow trends in climate is two fold:

• how to expand coping limits in the face of increased

climate variability so that the damage to livelihoods of

extreme events is minimized;

• how to adapt livelihoods so that longer-term resilience

can be strengthened.

Participatory vulnerability and capacity assessment

(PVCA) is a tool already used extensively in risk reduction

work. When informed by a climate change analysis, this

can be deployed to address both fast-onset disaster

risk and slow-onset climate change. It also provides an

opportunity to examine how long- and short-term climate

change risks interact with each other and with other

risks, such as earthquakes, conflict and unaccountable

governance.

Climate change analysis

Climate change analysis involves five basic steps:

1. accessing climate science, and particularly time

series data for key variables such as rainfall,

temperature, etc;

2. documenting local knowledge, which can raise

additional questions that science can address, so

these first two steps may require some iteration;

3. cross-referencing science with local knowledge,

increasing the value of information through

triangulation and attribution;

4. prioritizing key climate risks and developing this

into a forward-looking scenario to detail what might

happen over the next 10 years;

5. linking back to climate scientists regularly to get

the latest information in this fast-moving field, and

feed back local knowledge and new information

requirements.

The value of local knowledge is increasingly

acknowledged and is, for example, included in regional

climate outlook fora. Certain livelihoods groups,

especially pastoralists, are known as ‘libraries’ of

climate expertise and can provide vital location-specific

information where gaps exist in climate science coverage.

Where science and local knowledge agree, confidence

increases. Where they disagree reveals interesting points

for discussion. For example, a low-density network of

meteorology stations may miss flash floods cited by the

community as a major emerging threat. On the other

hand, community knowledge may be vulnerable to biases

which need to be addressed by the scientific record.

The key issue for both national climate science

institutions and the emerging Global Framework for

Climate Services is how scientific information can be

made available through mechanisms such as climate

change analysis to support risk reduction and adaptation

by the poorest and most vulnerable.

Author

Richard Ewbank,

Christian Aid,

35 Lower Marsh, Waterloo, London, SE1 7RL.

Email: REwbank@christian-aid.org