Strengthening local adaptive capacity – the key to sustainability in the face of climate change

Persistent drought... incessant rain... flash floods... hurricanes.... forest fires... hardly a day passes without a news item on how climate change is affecting people’s lives and livelihoods. Climate change poses countless challenges for farmers, pastoralists, fishers, forest dwellers and others who depend on natural resources for their living. Poor rural communities, especially women, bear the biggest brunt of such climate-related disasters. Yet, the initiatives of these very communities to respond to change offer entry points to sustainable processes of climate-change adaptation (CCA).

 

The challenge of climate change calls for action to assist vulnerable communities to cope and adapt. And this is precisely the kind of action that PROLINNOVA – a global partnership programme of GFAR for PROmoting Local INNOVAtion in ecologically oriented agriculture and natural resource management – has been pursuing since 2004. PROLINNOVA recognises the “grassroots” initiatives of affected communities in dealing with climate change not only to protect but also to enhance their livelihoods. Such adaptations build on local creativity and are often cheaper, suit the specific circumstances better, make better use of available resources and are more sustainable than large-scale interventions.

 

Three countries in the PROLINNOVA network – Nepal, Niger and Ethiopia - studied rural people’s perception of climate change and their creative responses to it. The results of these and some other studies revealed that many rural people have, on their own initiative, developed innovations to cope with perceived changes in rainfall, wind patterns or temperature, although often not consciously linking these to global climate change....read more.