Seminar: Local livelihood strategies and climate change

The seminar included two sessions. Below you can read the conclusions from:

Part 1, April 29, 2008
Part 2, May 27, 2008

 
Part 1: Not so helpless - Local responses to climate change in developing countries
Local populations in developing countries are not helpless victims of climate change, but relate and respond actively to changes in their local environment. That was one of the key messages coming out of a recent seminar held at DIIS in collaboration with the Danish Development Research Network.

The seminar was attended by practitioners, researchers and diplomats from the development community and took its outset in a presentation by Chasca Twyman from the University of Sheffield. Twyman described the findings of a recent cutting-edge study from South Africa, which showed that rural communities were well aware of the environmental changes brought on by climate change, and respond by adapting their livelihoods in multiple ways.

Drawing on these findings, the seminar participants discussed and identified some of the key challenges that policy makers, donors and researchers need to confront and address in order to support such local adaptation strategies. A summary of these and the seminar in general is available below, as are the slides from Chasca Twyman’s presentation.

Seminar summary [pdf]
Twyman presentation [pdf]

Part 2: A lot is already known, but action is needed
The seminar provided insights on possible consequences of climate change on local livelihood strategies of indigenous peoples, farmers and island dwellers and discussed the implications for development policy and practice.
 
Following an introduction [pdf] provided by Jakob Kronik, member of the Poverty and Environment working group, the seminar featured three presentations offered from the Danish resource base:
 
Climate change and indigenous people [pdf], by Christina Nilsson, IWGIA

Impacts of Climate Change on Pacific atolls: Vulnerability and Adaptive Capacity
A case study from the Ontong Java atoll, Solomon Islands [pdf], by Thomas Birk, University of Copenhagen

Coping with climate change vulnerability – issues related to development and agricultural linkages in developing countries [pdf], by Sara Trærup, Risø, DTU and University of Copenhagen

Besides exploring the likely consequences of climate change on local livelihoods in different parts of the world, the three presentations raised a number of important dilemmas to be carefully addressed in the efforts to seek to adapt to and mitigate future climate change. Among these dilemmas are:

• The extent to which international efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation will take place at the expense of land and use rights of local people, including of indigenous peoples.
• How to balance long-term development efforts to protect local livelihoods viz-à-viz short-term risk management?

These presentations provided the basis for group discussions which explored the extent to which climate change and the aim to support poor people’s ability to adapt to climate change warrant new policies and types of interventions or simply calls for real commitment to what is already known to contribute to support the livelihoods of the rural poor. The following are some of the points that were emphasized during the group discussions:

• Although the root causes may be different now than before, variability and coping with it to reduce the vulnerability it gives rise to have long been salient features of the majority of the livelihoods strategies of the rural poor people. A lot is known about this vulnerability and the institutional and natural resource management strategies that work to support the livelihoods of the rural poor. Previously gained lessons in this field should be applied also in the context of adaptation to climate change. These include lessons from community-based natural resource management, from decentralization, and lessons on importance of the institutional framework for natural resource management as well as the fact that in many parts of the world, disaster management plans already exist – but lack funding – at district and national level.
• Weather forecasts, taking into considerations climate change, are more important to rural people now than ever, given that experience-based knowledge on how to interpret signs in nature increasingly become an inadequate basis for the decision-making of farmers, livestock keepers, forest dwellers and fishers. This calls for data, institutional capacity to collect and analyse this data, as well as capacity to translate and communicate this data as information that is useful in such decision making.
• While some of the livelihood impacts of climate change might resemble livelihood impacts of other phenomena – although at different intensity in time and scale – some of the interventions proposed to adapt to and prevent further climate change may in themselves pose threats to local livelihoods. Intentionally or not, the climate change agenda may serve as the pretext for challenging territorial and resource management rights of local people, including indigenous communities, and for promoting forced relocations of people as part of risk management plans, etc. There is a strong need for an attentive civil society to closely follow and – when necessary – challenge such interventions undertaken with reference to the climate change agenda. Power relations also matters in relation to climate change and climate change often accentuates inequality and social conflict over access to natural resources.

The next seminar in the Poverty and Environment seminar series will be held on September 30, 2008, and the topic will be Local Participation in Protected Area Management – Opportunities and Constraints – Part I. The seminar will feature presentations and discussion of work-in-progress from the Danish resource base. For more information, please visit the website of DIIS.