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.

Social inequalities put many poor people on the frontline of harmful climate change impacts while constraining their options for taking action to reduce them through adaptation. Gender is often a defining factor of these barriers to adaptation. Critical awareness of and effective measures to address gender inequalities, therefore, are key elements of CARE’s work on addressing climate change. Empowering women, and engaging men in a process whereby women and men work together as equally recognised decision-makers and agents of change from the household to the global level, is a crucial pathway toward gender equality, and resilience.

Human-induced climate change is modifying patterns of extreme weather, including floods, cyclones and droughts. In many cases, climate change is making these hazards more intense, more frequent, less predictable and/or longer lasting. This magnifies the risk of “disasters” everywhere, but especially in those parts of the world where there are already high levels of human vulnerability.

Background

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.

Objectives

The purpose of this toolkit is to guide facilitating groups or teams of development practitioners in pursuing participatory collaboration with communities to research and implement adaptation coalitions. This is done to assist the locality in adapting to the local manifestations of climate change. Using the Adaptation Coalition Framework (ACF) as an adaptation tool, strategically links the multiple resources of market, state and civil society at various levels to best facilitate the adaptation of vulnerable communities to climate change.

The framework facilitates informed local participation in the policy making process by which decisions on adaptation can be made. Building capacity for informed participation is especially critical for adapting to climate change. This is because climate change impacts are, on the one hand, highly variable, longer-term and difficult to predict, and on the other hand, have unique local effects due to the distinct social, economic and environmental conditions of every community.

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.”

Human and natural systems are influenced by climate variability and hazards, though the negative impacts are most severely felt in developing countries. Increased climate variability, such as the occurrence of more frequent droughts and storms and more erratic or intense rainfall patterns, is associated with climatic change. Such climate change effects will intensify significantly in the future.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defined adaptation in 2001 as the “adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities” (IPCC 2001: Third Assessment Report [TAR] on Climate Change, p. 982). But it was not until 2007, at the Thirteenth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP-13), when a comprehensive process was launched through the convention’s Bali Action Plan in which adaptation was clearly highlighted together with three other pillars: mitigation, technology transfer, and deployment and financing (Decision -1c/CP.13 Bali Action Plan, December 2007).

Adaptation occurs in physical, ecological and human systems, and takes place through adjustments to reduce vulnerability or enhance resilience in response to experienced or expected changes in climate. Other stressors affecting vulnerability include meteorological hazards, poverty and unequal access to resources, food insecurity, trends in economic globalization, conflict, and incidence of disease. Adaptation should build on adaptive capacity to address climate change impacts (IPCC 2007, Burton 2006, McGray et ál. 2007).

Understanding adaptive capacity at the local level in Mozambique

Mozambique faces both a 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. Though most development interventions do not seek directly to address climate change, the impacts of development projects are likely to influence the ability of individuals and communities to respond and adapt. However, few development actors have considered how their interventions are influencing communities’ adaptive capacity, or what can be done to further enhance it.

Anabig Ayaab is a 50 year old farmer from Tariganga, Garu-Tempane District, in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Tariganga is in the dry savannah zone of northern Ghana where vegetative cover is sparse, especially during the dry season. The village and surrounding landscape is flat and dusty at this time, with the few trees that still stand, including shea-nut used for cosmetics and dawadawa, a local medicinal tree, shedding their leaves. The landscape will become increasingly green with the June rains. These rains will only last until October when the dry season, with varying temperatures and wind conditions, will set in again and last for the remainder of the year, guaranteeing a hungry period from March or April until the next rains.

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.

What changes do we need to empower women smallholders and achieve food security? This question has been asked repeatedly over the past several decades, but transformative changes in both public policy and practice have been few and far between. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), closing the „gender gap‟ in agriculture – or increasing women‟s contribution to food production and enterprise by providing equal access to resources and opportunities – could reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12-17 per cent, or by 100 to 150 million people.

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.