Petra Tschakert

Anticipatory Learning for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience

This paper is a methodological contribution to emerging debates on the role of learning, particularly forward-looking (anticipatory) learning, as a key element for adaptation and resilience in the context of climate change. First, we describe two major challenges: understanding adaptation as a process and recognizing the inadequacy of existing learning tools, with a specific focus on high poverty contexts and complex livelihood-vulnerability risks. Then, the article examines learning processes from a dynamic systems perspective, comparing theoretical aspects and conceptual advances in resilience thinking and action research/learning (AR/AL). Particular attention is paid to learning loops (cycles), critical reflection, spaces for learning, and power. Finally, we outline a methodological framework to facilitate iterative learning processes and adaptive decision making in practice. We stress memory, monitoring of key drivers of change, scenario planning, and measuring anticipatory capacity as crucial ingredients. Our aim is to identify opportunities and obstacles for forward-looking learning processes at the intersection of climatic uncertainty and development challenges in Africa, with the overarching objective to enhance adaptation and resilient livelihood pathways, rather than learning by shock.

From impacts to embodied experiences: tracing political ecology in climate change research

Political ecology has long moved on from its initial skepticism of big science engagements and cursory critiques of simplistic vulnerability approaches. Its core strengths lie in understanding the contestation of inequalities, marginalization, and injustices in access to and control over resources, neoliberal politics of environmental change, and dominant environmental narratives, while incorporating new insights from development ethics, feminist social theory, and resilience thinking. Today’s theoretical lenses allow for an understanding of causal relations in climate debates that exceed narrowly defined impact studies. I focus on four areas that exemplify shifts in engagement with adaptation, stretch themes of inquiry, and delineate zones for analysis and action: (1) reconnecting scale: multiscalar interactions, scalar dimensions of practice, and traversing scales from embodied experiences to the global intimate; (2) destabilizing gender: from gendered vulnerability and adaptive capacity to fragmented identities and intersectionality; (3) repositioning persistent inequalities: from rights to responsibilities, mutual fragility, and human security; and (4) reframing certainty: from climate proofing to limits, traps, and transformative change. Methodologically, I advocate for opening space for collective and anticipatory learning, creative envisioning, rehearsing for reality, and dynamic planning in the context of multiple and synergistic stressors, all powerful countervoices to hegemonic integrated modeling and numeric vulnerability indices.

Inequality and transformation analyses: a complementary lens for addressing vulnerability to climate change

Vulnerability assessments (VAs) are the dominant method to establish who and what is vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change. Researchers and practitioners typically use VAs to measure material vulnerability in terms of unbalanced sets of assets and institutional vulnerability regarding socially differentiated access to rights and decision-making processes. However, as scholarship on vulnerability and adaptation aligns in a better manner with development and sustainability priorities and focuses more explicitly on interrelations between climate and global change, creative complementary approaches to understanding vulnerability are needed, both conceptually and methodologically. This article discusses the generational shifts of climate change VAs over the last 25 years, their achievements and blind spots. We note declining attention to broad structural and relational drivers of vulnerability and inequality, and an inadequate understanding of vulnerability dynamics which hampers forward-looking change processes. To remedy these blind spots, and based on the reflections on building adaptive capacity coupled with emergent debates on societal transformation, we propose a comprehensive framework for Inequality and Transformation Analyses. The framework, fusing previously fractured approaches, combines assessments of structural and relational drivers of inequalities and marginalization as well as possible solution spaces with reflective and relational opportunities for anticipatory learning and transformative change. It contributes to alternative framings for a more relational research agenda on social-ecological vulnerability and adaptation.

Buruli Ulcer Disease and Its Association with Land Cover in Southwestern Ghana

Background Buruli ulcer (BU), one of 17 neglected tropical diseases, is a debilitating skin and soft tissue infection caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans. In tropical Africa, changes in land use and proximity to water have been associated with the disease. This study presents the first analysis of BU at the village level in southwestern Ghana, where prevalence rates are among the highest globally, and explores fine and medium-scale associations with land cover by comparing patterns both within BU clusters and surrounding landscapes. Methodology/Principal Findings We obtained 339 hospital-confirmed BU cases in southwestern Ghana between 2007 and 2010. The clusters of BU were identified using spatial scan statistics and the percentages of six land cover classes were calculated based on Landsat and Rapid Eye imagery for each of 154 villages/towns. The association between BU prevalence and each land cover class was calculated using negative binomial regression models. We found that older people had a significantly higher risk for BU after considering population age structure. BU cases were positively associated with the higher percentage of water and grassland surrounding each village, but negatively associated with the percent of urban. The results also showed that BU was clustered in areas with high percentage of mining activity, suggesting that water and mining play an important and potentially interactive role in BU occurrence. Conclusions/Significance Our study highlights the importance of multiple land use changes along the Offin River, particularly mining and agriculture, which might be associated with BU disease in southwestern Ghana. Our study is the first to use both medium- and high-resolution imagery to assess these changes. We also show that older populations (≥ 60 y) appear to be at higher risk of BU disease than children, once BU data were weighted by population age structures.

Gender Justice and Rights in Climate Change Adaptation: Opportunities and Pitfalls

We present three rights-based approaches to research and policies on gender justice and equity in the context of climate change adaptation. After a short introduction, we describe the dominant discourse that frames climate change and provide an overview of the literature that has depicted women both as vulnerable victims of climatic change and as active agents in adaptive responses. Discussion follows on the shift from gendered impacts to gendered adaptive capacities and embodied experiences, highlighting the continuing impact of social biases and institutional practices that shape unequal access to and control over household and community decision-making processes undermining timely, fair, and successful adaptive responses. Assessment of rights-based frameworks considers the space they provide in addressing persistent gender and other inequalities, at different political and operational scales. We argue that a human security framework is useful to fill the gap in current gender and climate justice work, particularly when implemented through the entry point of adaptive social protection. Gender justice in climate change adaptation is an obligation for transformational social change, not just rights. The time is ripe to replace narrow-minded vulnerability studies with a contextualized understanding of our mutual fragility and a commitment to enhanced livelihood resilience, worldwide.

Solastalgia: Environmentally Induced Distress and Migration Among Africa’s Poor Due to Climate Change

Primarily due to a high dependence on agro-ecosystems and their vulnerability to environmental changes, Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and variability (IPCC, 2007). Poor rural societies that are dependent on climate-sensitive resources will be the most affected, with potential negative impacts including loss of income, displacement, and internal migration.

1.5°C or 2°C: a conduit's view from the science-policy interface at COP20 in Lima, Peru

An average global 2°C warming compared to pre-industrial times is commonly understood as the most important target in climate policy negotiations. It is a temperature target indicative of a fiercely debated threshold between what some consider acceptable warming and warming that implies dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system and hence to be avoided. Although this 2°C target has been officially endorsed as scientifically sound and justified in the Copenhagen Report issued by the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2009, the large majority of countries (over two-thirds) that have signed and ratified the UNFCCC strongly object to this target as the core of the long-term goal of keeping temperatures below a certain danger level. Instead, they promote a 1.5°C target as a more adequate limit for dangerous interference. At COP16 in Cancun, parties to the convention recognized the need to consider strengthening the long-term global goal in the so-called 2013–2015 Review, given improved scientific knowledge, including the possible adoption of the 1.5°C target. In this perspective piece, I examine the discussions of a structured expert dialogue (SED) between selected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors, myself included, and parties to the convention to assess the adequacy of the long-term goal. I pay particular attention to the uneven geographies and power differentials that lay behind the ongoing political debate regarding an adequate target for protecting ecosystems, food security, and sustainable development.

Learning and envisioning under climatic uncertainty: An African experience

Learning about and embracing change and uncertainty are essential for responding to climate change. Creativity, critical reflection, and cogenerative inquiry can enhance adaptive capacity, or the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to adverse future impacts. However, precisely how learning about change and its driving forces occurs and how experiences are combined with envisioned yet indefinite prospects of the future are poorly understood. We present two linked methodological tools—an assessment of drivers of change and participatory scenario building—used in a climate change adaptation project in Ghana and Tanzania (ALCCAR). We discuss opportunities and challenges of such iterative learning. Our findings suggest that joint exploration, diverse storylines, and deliberation help to expand community-based adaptation repertoires and to strike a balance between hopelessness and a tendency to idealize potential future realities.

Gender, Development, and Rights-Based Approaches: Lessons for Climate Change Adaptation and Adaptive Social Protection

As adaptation policies increasingly aim to recognize the agency and autonomy of marginalized groups, the push for gender-sensitive climate change policy is also gaining voice and visibility. This shift is akin to the growing popularity of rights-based approaches to development, suggesting that lessons can be drawn from previous gender and development debates to inform adaptation policy and practices. In this chapter, we explore the nexus between gender, development, and right-based approaches in order to highlight the possibilities and pitfalls of such an approach to adaptation. We examine recent (adaptive) social protection programs to understand the potential of rights-based approaches to build capacity and enhance resilience under climate change. Finally, by emphasizing social responsibilities to and for others, we indicate the opening of spaces for a more inclusive social project for promoting adaptation that values differential skills, assets, expertise, and voices while acknowledging the limits of autonomous actors in adaptation.

Post-2012 climate action in the broad framework of sustainable development policies: the role of the EU

Abstract The linkages between climate change and sustainable development are multiple and profound. Nonetheless, their respective policy regimes have so far evolved along parallel, if not competing, paths. What is lacking to date is a detailed conceptual understanding of the practicability of their integration through cross-sectoral policies and programmes. We propose a synergistic adaptive capacity (SAC) framework that places adaptive capacity and equity at the centre of current policy debates. This framework, based on social vulnerability as a linking element between climate change adaptation and poverty reduction, goes beyond current attempts to ‘mainstream’ adaptation and mitigation into national development priorities. We outline guidelines on how to operationalize the SAC framework and, at the end, define the role of the EU in promoting and implementing these synergies within the post-2012 climate policy regime.