Browse by Theme: Resilience

Engager les communautés de base dans la construction de la résilience climatique au Burkina Faso, au Mali et au Niger

French language version of the report Participatory analysis of climate change vulnerability and adaptive capacity: Involving communities in building climate resilience in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

This report outlines the practical lessons learned by CARE about Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) to climate change, and explores how elements of the approach are evolving and being integrated into other development sectors.

This short briefing paper demonstrates how community based adaptation is an invaluable and essential component of the vision for resilience across Africa.

Participants from 12 West African countries confirmed the urgent need for community based adaptation to respond to the adverse effects of climate change at a West Africa Learning Event in Cotonou, 3-6th September 2013. Seventy two participants from a diverse range of 36 NGO and research organisations, and 14 government organisations shared and reflected on their experiences, successes, challenges, opportunities, questions and future perspectives across the region.

This communiqué is the collective product of these deliberations conveying strong messages on the crucial need to develop effective adaptation practice and policies to secure livelihoods and realise resilient development and economic growth in the face of an uncertain and changing climate.

The 2011 food crisis in the Horn of Africa demonstrated that community resilience is more urgent than ever. Using evidence from a five year, cross border programme in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, (RREAD) this paper aims to share evidence of approaches that work in building community resilience to shocks and stresses.

Key lessons for more effective natural resource management include, linking traditional knowledge with science and innovation, fostering inclusive local planning processes and improving access to markets to diversify livelihoods.

Boran, Gabra and Garri pastoralists in the border areas of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia have long relied on the management of natural resources to maximise land use and sustain livestock productivity. Managing herd movements plays a key role in rangeland management, with some areas suitable for use during the dry season and some during the wet season.

The rangeland as a whole constitutes a communally owned economic resource that must be shared among the different pastoralist ethnic groups and clans living in the area. They have developed an institutional system of primary and secondary rights of access with procedures and principles for negotiations between different pastoralist groups to regulate the sharing of water and pasture.

This indigenous institutional framework governs the mobility of herders and their livestock, including across the international border, maintains and restores collaboration among clans and ethnic groups and provides a framework for managing disputes and conflict.

"Adapting to climate change is about reducing vulnerability to current and projected climate risks. Vulnerability to climate change is determined in large part by people’s adaptive capacity. A particular climate hazard, such as a drought, does not affect all people within a community - or even the same household - equally because some people have greater capacity than others to manage the crisis. The inequitable distribution of rights, resources and power – as well as repressive cultural rules and norms – constrain many people’s ability to take action on climate change.

This is especially true for women. Therefore, gender is a critical factor in understanding vulnerability to climate change. CARE’s approach to adaptation begins with comprehensive analysis, including an examination of differential vulnerability due to social, political and economic inequalities."