Browse by Theme: Resilience

"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.

Pastoral areas in the Horn of Africa are frequently seen as a region of poverty and constant crisis, where repeated rain failures leave millions of people dependent on food aid. The long-term erosion of pastoralists’ resilience is ascribed to various causes: a degraded range, the loss of key grazing lands, increasing population pressure and conflict. But pastoralism is also a modern industry, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars each year from a thriving international trade, creating an increasingly commercialised livestock-owning class coexist-ing with an ever poorer majority.

This presents a dual challenge. How can this vital economic sector be supported, at the same time as sup-porting the majority of pastoralists to remain independent, with resilient livelihoods?

Evidence from Africa shows that development interventions could do more. Change is a constant in the lives of rural people in Africa. They have had to cope with both sudden shocks such as war, rain failures and food price spikes and with long-term stresses such as increasing population pressure on land, declines in their terms of trade, and the degradation of land and water.

They will have to cope with these pressures in the future, coupled with the growing impact of climate change. People need the ability to maintain (and even improve) their well-being in the face of change – whatever that change may be. This is what we call adaptive capacity.

Drawing on evidence from the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA) project (2010-11) – a research and advocacy consortium in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda – this Briefing Paper aims to understand better how different kinds of development interventions affect the characteristics of adaptive capacity.

Climate change impacts involve three defining features that are not always a part of other development challenges: they are diverse, long-term and not easily predictable. Adapting to these three traits is difficult because they require making contextspecific and forward-looking decisions regarding a variety of local climate impacts and vulnerabilities when the future is highly uncertain. The 2010 World Development Report: Development and Climate Change, echoes this by stating that, “Climate change adds an additional source of unknowns for decision makers to manage” and planners must accept “uncertainty as inherent to the climate change problem.

In Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands, livelihoods are dominated by pastoralism. Pastoral communities are accustomed to dealing with drought and erratic rainfall and have traditionally utilized systems and practices that minimized the impact of climate-related shocks to their livelihoods. Recently however, the impacts of climate change have combined with other environmental, economic and political factors to create a situation of increasing vulnerability for poor and marginalized households.

The situation is particularly serious for women, who face additional social, cultural and political constraints to resource access and adaptive decision-making. In response, some households have transitioned into an agro-pastoral way of life, combining the traditional livestock rearing with crop production and other economic activities. While this shift represents an innovation for these communities, it has also
exposed them to new risks and a different set of challenges in securing their livelihoods.

The Adaptation Coalition Toolkit was developed to promote the World Bank’s strategic priority to empower people by creating more inclusive, cohesive, and accountable societies in the face of climate change. The framework for this Toolkit was developed from testing its implementation over a two-year period in 24 Latin American case study communities in five countries. The results from this study are presented in the companion publication Building Community Resilience to Climate Change: Testing the Adaptation Coalition Framework in Latin America produced by the World Bank’s Social Development Unit of the Latin America and Caribbean Region. The methodology has been refined and strengthened through the case study process with this Toolkit as the final product.

Insights from Application of CARE’s Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (CVCA) Methodology.

This report was written by Angie Dazé, with significant inputs from Vu Lan Huong, Dang Thu Phuong, Nguyen Thi Yen, Dang My Hanh, Julie Webb, Romanus Gyang, Cynthia Awuor, Maurine Ambani, Gabriela Fontenla Razzetto and Tatiana Farfan De la Vega. The report benefited from useful feedback from Karl Deering, Agnes Otzelberger, Tonya Rawe, Fiona Percy, Cynthia Awuor, Bruce Ravesloot, Kit Vaughan and Phil Franks. We are grateful to all staff and partner organizations that conducted field work and analysis that contributed to the report. Finally, sincere appreciation to all of the people in the communities we work with who took the time to share their experiences and provide their perspectives.