Browse by Theme: Climate Change

For successful climate change adaptation and mitigation actions, Parties at COP17 need to explicitly address gender equality and women’s empowerment, building on, and ensuring the implementation of, existing gender considerations in UNFCCC decisions agreed over the past 3 years.

Without appropriate efforts to reduce gender inequalities at all levels, strategies to address climate change will not be effective and sustainable. Gender-blind strategies may perpetuate or may even exacerbate these inequalities, undermining human rights and reversing achievements on vulnerability reduction and poverty eradication.

For lasting adaptation solutions in a changing climate, an international climate change regime must place pro-poor and gender-equitable approaches at its core and provide sufficient funding for and prioritise the needs of the most vulnerable people. At COP17 in Durban, Parties must deliver on the action items in the Cancun Agreements to continue operationalising the Adaptation Framework.

Mozambique faces both rapidly changing climate and development pressures. At the local level, many communities do not have the necessary tools, resources or capacity to adapt, and will require support from government and other development actors.

Research by the New Economics Foundation and CARE International in Garissa, Kenya, has found that investing in community-based adaptation makes strong economic sense, even in volatile environments. According to the research, investing $1 in adaptation generates between $1.45 and $3.03 of wealth for communities. And the costs of intervention were 2.6 times lower on average than the costs of not addressing climate change and extreme weather events.

A report from the Danish Institute for International Studies with input from CARE Denmark, focuses on the links between climate change and conflict, the types of conflict and approaches to conflict prevention. CARE Niger’s Wells for Peace project is featured as a case study, with its main innovation ‘a thoroughly participatory approach in which social agreement amongst key stakeholders and users is reached before the infrastructure – in this case a well – is established.’ The approach is credited with preventing local conflicts that normally result from water initiatives. With conflicts turning violent in the intervention region falling from 56% at baseline to 24% to 0% after 5 years.

"CARE is working to help people and communities in developing countries better adapt and become more resilient to a climate they did not create. We support women and men, girls and boys becoming agents of change–because we believe that, with the right knowledge and sufficient means, families are able to adapt themselves.

Mariamo Amade is a 35 year old woman. She and her husband are from the Gelo-Sede community, Angoche district, a community on the northern coast of Mozambique. The main livelihoods in the community are fishing and farming and the main crops produced are cassava and beans. Mariamo and her husband, as well as many of their neighbours, were victims of the cyclone Jokwe which affected many communities in Angoche district, in March 2008.