Lisa Horrocks, Principal Climate Resilience Consultant at Mott MacDonald, comments on some initiatives tackling the issue around long term climate change solutions. Wherever we are in the world, economic development requires us to take decisions which either have short or very long lifetimes. Long lifetime decisions can be extremely costly and risky, especially with shifting baselines. This is the situation with …
We need to flip science on its head
In her opening speech at the Resilient Solutions symposium Professor Rosalind Cornforth, Director of the Walker Institute, challenged the development community to make science fit for purpose by taking it out of the laboratory and into the field. Here is a summary of the speech. As a third year doctorate student in African meteorology I travelled to Senegal for my …
Climate insurance: closing the protection or the resilience gap?
Does climate insurance work as a catalyst for climate risk management and sustainable development? Or is insurance deflecting attention from other disaster risk management solutions? Swenja Surminski, Senior Research Fellow at the London School for Economics, argues there is no simple answer. Risks are rising and there is low usage of insurance The devastating impacts of natural disasters are seen …
Transformational climate adaptation: beyond business-as-usual
People around the world are faced with the challenge of adapting to changing climatic conditions, but what happens when small changes are not enough or are not even possible? Nick Brooks, Director of Garama 3C Ltd makes the case for transformational adaptation. Most of today’s adaptation interventions involve incremental approaches intended to protect and sustain existing systems and practices, rather …
Does knowledge matter in setting the development agenda?
Are marginalised people being overlooked in decision making processes around development and adaptation? Daniel Morchain reflects on the relationship between knowledge and power to influence outcomes. The more I think about development challenges, and the more I see and hear people talking about them, the more I think they come down to a struggle between knowledge and power. Knowledge in the …
What can resilience do for us?
How can we use resilience to do development and humanitarian work differently and in ways that truly make societies work for and with people living in poverty? Helen Jeans, Oxfam’s Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation Adviser, explains why Oxfam is hosting a symposium on resilience and invites you to join the event in Oxford from 27-28 June 2017. There is …
Drought and water scarcity
Sally Rangecroft, from the University of Birmingham University, and Niko Wanders, from Princeton and Utrecht University, explore the interconnected relationship between drought and water scarcity. Droughts have been very much in the news recently, notably the lengthy drought in California and the impacts of El Niño on Southern Africa and the Horn and Eastern Africa. An extended drought is currently …
A harvest of dysfunction: Causes and impacts of drought in South Africa
John Magrath introduces the report, A Harvest of Dysfunction: rethinking the approach to drought, its causes and impacts in South Africa. “Interventions to assist poor people affected by drought must start with how drought itself is defined and understood” – so says Sipho Mthathi, Executive Director of Oxfam South Africa in her introduction to a new report that challenges the …
Research-into-Use for climate change adaptation
Sue Moore explains the use of Research-into-Use and explores what this means for researchers, practitioners and ultimately, those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. ‘We want water, not research!’ exclaimed a woman attending a stakeholder engagement workshop in Southern Afar, Ethiopia in February 2016. Why indeed focus on research, when the immediate needs of much of the population …
Why must climate change be de-naturalised and re-politicised?
Food insecurity, conflict and climate change are among many stresses often originated in or made worse by bad, unrepresentative governance. Daniel Morchain, Global Adviser on Climate Change Adaptation, examines the biased nature in which climate change is often approached and calls for a more complex framing in order to avoid missing its manifold dimensions. he reason why taking photographs has …