That we found more Interesting

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

How can we incorporate local knowledge into climate planning and policy? …Maps!

In Kenya, participatory mapping makes it possible for indigenous knowledge to be included in planning and policy where for too long it
was excluded, showing technology can bring people’s voices to power.

Pastoralists in Isiolo County, Kenya recorded their knowledge and use of drylands resources on georeferenced satellite maps through a participatory mapping process (Photo: copyright James Pattison/IIED)


Isiolo County in northern Kenya’s arid and semi-arid region is typical of many dryland landscapes. Pastoralists face increasing challenges to ensure their animals have enough pasture and water in an environment characterized by variable and unpredictable rainfall.

The fact that publicly accessible, quality drinking water for people and livestock is scarce – due to high demand and low supply exacerbated by climate change and years of underinvestment in local water infrastructure – makes this challenge even greater.

One of the obstacles to effective climate-resilient development is the lack of appropriate tools for planning and institutional weaknesses within local governments. Proper planning and structures and climate financing the mechanism can ensure that people’s priorities and their deep customary institutional knowledge is integrated into planning to ensure that people can have thriving livelihoods despite the increasing impacts of climate change.

The process of participatory mapping shows how technology can be used to enable community members to express local knowledge in a way that the government understands. In Kenya it is clear: maps have been instrumental in helping to address power imbalances and enable indigenous knowledge to be recognized and incorporated into planning and policy where for too long it was excluded.

Mapping the problem

To address issues around the lack of appropriate planning tools that reflect people’s priorities, the Adaptation Consortium (Ada) – a group of state and non-state organisations under Kenya’s National Drought Management Authority – established the County Climate Change Fund (CCCF).

This mechanism enables community institutions to make decisions about how climate adaptation funds are spent and introduces participatory planning and decision-making tools so local priorities and knowledge are included in government policy and implemented. It has been key to making it possible to digitally map Isiolo’s resources in a way that is truly participatory.

In 2013, when the first fund was established in Isiolo County with DFID support, Ada Consortium partners held workshops with government officials, CCCF Ward County Climate Planning Committee representatives and traditional leaders to carry out participatory digital resource mapping to pinpoint the location and quality of key resources.

By bringing communities and government officials together to explain and digitally map soil types, grazing areas, drought reserves, water points and their quality, as well as potential farming areas, county government facilitators could map customary natural resource management regimes based on the planned mobility of livestock to carefully chosen grazing areas.

In the process of developing the maps, they learnt the importance of the Dedha, a customary council of elders responsible for regulating communal grazing reserves on a flexible, seasonal basis, depending on availability of resources and local need – and a key source of local information.

The maps show how poorly placed water sources were driving overgrazing. For example, the water points at Kinna township, a sub-county drought reserve that borders Meru National Park, and Yamicha in nearby Merti township, were shown to be providing permanent water access to an area traditionally designated as a drought reserve.
``As a result of this process of participation, local expertise can be expressed in a language that government uses, translating informal knowledge into formal policy and planning.``
This encouraged year-round grazing for those willing to break the customary rules that limit access until resources elsewhere have been depleted. The reserves were becoming overgrazed, undermining sustainable use and driving conflict over grazing resources.
 
Using participatory digital resource maps have helped change this. The maps provide evidence for the value of closing some water points, demonstrating the need for the Dedha’s customary knowledge to support decision making and maintain sustainable grazing regimes. As a result, the Ward County Climate Planning Committees have used CCCF funds to support the Dedha to function, and to close or reopen water points in line with local strategic priorities.

Strengthening protection and elevating voices

The mapping tool offers communities and their representatives an opportunity to shape the evidence used by government to inform spending, policies and laws.

By allowing them to choose what resources to map and how to map them, they make processes or areas of interest visible that are not typically seen by government officials – including customarily restricted grazing reserves, livestock routes, spiritual sites and informal trading spaces that they feel are important to protect. The maps strengthen the voices and ability of people to protect sites that matter.
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This is important, because it is customary institutions and rules that dominate how people manage variability and unpredictability across Kenya. These institutions have developed sustainable approaches to managing their landscapes out of necessity, and often shape the way people use resources, but are not formally recognised by government.

As a result of this process of participation, local expertise can be expressed in a language that government uses, translating informal knowledge into formal policy and planning. Their digital, publicly verifiable nature increases accountability, by making clear the evidence on which decisions are being made.







In 2016, the maps informed the development of the Isiolo Customary Natural Resource Management Bill and were used as evidence justifying the designation of grazing areas. Significantly, it also allocates responsibility to the Dedha elders for coordinating the country’s natural resources, ensuring they are conserved and protected, applying traditional penalties for rule breakers and escalating to the formal courts If necessary

To date, the bill has run into the messy reality of county government politics. Political parties with allegiances to particular ethnic groupings, each with their own customary grazing systems, want to make sure that one pastoralist group’s customary rules are not given prominence over others.
All sides want to make sure that the bill reduces, rather than fuels, conflict. Getting the bill through the county legislative process will require further negotiation between political representatives to recognise the multiple grazing regimes in place and to develop a fair representation that remains sustainable.

Mapping challenges and potential

Making sure the maps retain local knowledge, are participatory and are up to date is not without its challenges. First, the maps need regular updating, which costs money. And the number of county staff who can update them needs to increase, which requires training programmes for the staff.
Neighbouring Wajir County, which has also set up a CCCF, has already established a GIS Mapping Lab to solve that challenge.
Gender considerations are also important. One of the challenges is to involve women and to ensure that the information that is gathered is gender balanced. The Dedha is dominated by older men and traditionally views women as peripheral to customary decision making, leaving women without the right to make decisions about livestock or land.
As a result, the different challenges that men and women face from climate change or resource scarcity are typically ignored, because women are not in the room during key decision-making about land management or the design of water points and their placement.
The challenge is to ensure that the map-making process recognises and incorporates multiple perspectives and encourages dialogue.
These issues can only be addressed through using a patient approach. While women are increasingly represented in formal spaces, the path to representation in customary spaces is still unclear and the process is slow.
With new CCCFs introduced in neighbouring Wajir, Garissa, Makueni, Kitui, Vihiga and, most recently, Tharaka Nithi, this process will be duplicated, increasing the potential for shifting entrenched power structures.
The fact that government in Kenya is decentralised also means that local governments can independently choose to use the maps to inform planning – integrating the perspectives of historically marginalised groups into government action, bringing the people’s voices to power.
This blog was originally posted on the From Poverty to Power website.
   

City leaders need to rise to the climate change challenge

City leaders from around the world are meeting in Abu Dhabi for the 10th World Urban Forum on sustainable urbanization (8-13 February). IIED director Andrew Norton and Maimunah Mohd Sharif, executive director of UN-Habitat, highlight the need for leaders to work with residents of informal settlements in order to prepare for the impacts of climate change.
 
 An open sewer runs in front of homes in Mukuru informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya (Photo: SuSanA Secretariat, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 )

As national governments struggle to agree on climate action, city leaders attending the Tenth World Urban Forum (WUF10) in Abu Dhabi this week need to show they can rise to the challenge.
 
Adapting to climate change is a huge challenge for urban areas around the world. It is particularly significant for cities in the developing world, which are expected to be home to over two billion more people by 2050.

As these cities grow, they will expand further into areas at risk from sea-level rise, flooding, and landslides, with poorer residents concentrated in the most hazardous places. Already, many are being hit by disasters that science shows will be more frequent or intense due to climate change.

More than one billion people – mostly in Africa and Asia – are living in slums or informal settlements that are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. The women, children, and men living in these areas face additional problems due to low-quality housing, poor access to public infrastructure and services, and are often politically and socially marginalized. Even a small rise in temperatures has a big impact as homes and workshops have corrugated iron roofs, making them unbearably hot.

The mayors and governors gathering from around the world has a major role to play in making sure their cities are prepared for the rapidly escalating impacts of climate change

Planners will need to use new types of information to guide their investment decisions, including more detailed scientific data on climate trends and how they will affect urban environments, such as whether higher temperatures, sea-level rise or river flooding are likely to be the most critical issues for their cities. They will need training and support to use this information to guide their decisions on what infrastructure to prioritize and how to work with residents to reduce these risks.

Local governments also need to recognize communities’ knowledge of the nature of risks and vulnerabilities in low-income and informal urban centers. It is critical for all decisions about how best to adapt cities to climate change involve the people who are most affected. This is crucial to make sure action meets people’s needs and changes behavior.

In Mukuru, a large informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, the county government has been working directly with local people to transform the quality of buildings, which will also help the settlement be more resilient to climate change.

Residents have been at the center of identifying their priorities and what needs to be done. National urban policies – as identified in UN-Habitat’s 'new urban agenda' – play a key role in ensuring local governments have appropriate levels of autonomy and resources to address the climate crisis.

Changes need to include working with nature – or bringing it back into the city by planting trees and developing green spaces to reduce temperatures and flooding as in Gorakhpur, India. Community gardens and urban agriculture have helped reduce flooding, while also improving poor residents’ nutrition and helping them earn money from selling vegetables.

Reducing risks requires substantial investment, whether to improve coastal defenses, drainage, water supplies or for working with nature. It is not just the amount of money, it is also important it is invested where it matters – in and for communities. IIED shows in ‘Money where it matters: designing funds for the frontier’, how a fundamental reform of climate finance distribution, including through locally managed funds and smart municipal national investments, can target finance effectively to meet the poorest people’s climate needs.

In response, UN-Habitat has dedicated one of its new flagship programs for the next five to 10 years to support national governments, municipal administrations and communities to mobilize climate investments in and for urban poor communities.

But this needs to happen alongside improving low-income housing, job opportunities, education and healthcare. City governments must make sure that safe and affordable land is made available for sustainable development of poorer communities and neighborhoods, for people to improve their own homes, while NGOs and community architects can help to develop affordably designs that can withstand the impacts of climate change.

Much more needs to be done to address how the climate crisis affects cities, particularly people living in informal settlements. It is crucial they are included in designing the solutions.

Zanzibar economy suffering effects of climate change

The development of the Indian Ocean archipelago of Zanzibar is being held back by the effects of climate change, according to a senior minister on the island.
Agriculture, fishing and tourism are all being negatively impacted as sea-levels and temperatures rise.
Zanzibar says it doesn’t have the resources to counter the effects of climate change.
It’s brought a delegation to a conference on small island developing states or SIDS currently being held in Samoa, in the Pacific Ocean, in order to build partnerships and get recognized itself as a small island nation.
Daniel Dickinson asked Fatma Fereji, Minister in the First Vice President's Office of Zanzibar, to explain the affects of climate change.

..to be updated soon

Thursday, February 6, 2020

Moving money where it matters

Responding to climate change in Tanzania by strengthening dryland governance and planning

District governments in Tanzania are improving their capacity for effective adaptive planning by strengthening planning processes and establishing local adaptation funds. With support from a consortium of government and non-government stakeholders, they are testing a devolved climate finance mechanism for building resilience, which could inform policy and action in other drylands.

One of the devolved climate finance project sites in Zanzibar that has benefited from using existing government systems to channel climate finance towards investments prioritised by communities (Photo: Amina Kashoro)

In Tanzania, climate change is exacerbating the challenges to the livelihoods of millions of people. 
District Councils are the local government authorities leading the planning and budgeting process for local development, responsible for understanding community priorities and investing in social and economic development. This work in Tanzania is part of a wider programme, underpinned by shared principles and a common approach to devolving climate finance to the local level.

What is IIED doing?

Along with a consortium of government and non-government partners, IIED is providing technical support to the Government of Tanzania, in partnership with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF). The task is to design and implement a devolved climate finance mechanism that will enable climate resilient planning and budgeting.  
The mechanism uses existing government systems to channel climate finance towards investments prioritised by communities, which build resilience to the impacts of climate change. The nature of the approach draws on experience from other countries implementing similar mechanisms in KenyaMali and Senegal

Devolved climate finance in Tanzania

The devolved climate finance consortium supports the Local Climate Finance Initiative – a series of projects  improving the alignment of national and local government priorities and making sure climate change adaptation is included in development planning in Tanzania. 
The consortium is chaired by the President's Office – Regional and Local Government (PO-RALG), and includes the Vice President’s Office, Ministry of Finance, as well as government training institutions, including the Institute for Rural Development and Planning and the Local Government Training Institute. These institutions are responsible for developing programmes that will train future government employees on the approach and the lessons emerging from it. 
At community level Sustainable Environment Management Action and the Tanzania Natural Resource Forum provide implementation support and communication outreach.
Building on the experience of the Adaptation Consortium in Kenya, a number of districts in Northern and Central Tanzania  are building their readiness as future sub-national 'executing entities', to access and disburse climate finance in support of community-prioritised adaptation. The districts are piloting the devolved climate finance mechanism and sharing learning horizontally to other districts and vertically to government ministries and beyond. 
With funding from UKaid, the DCF Consortium is supporting the three districts to:
  • Establish devolved district level climate finance mechanisms
  • Enhance climate-resilient development planning at district and divisional levels
  • Research the role of customary institutions in climate resilient water planning and governance 
  • Inform national actors about lessons from the projects.
There has been significant involvement from the Tanzanian Meteorological Office, which has sought feedback from communities on climate information it currently produces. 
The project continues to seek to capitalised district level adaptation  funds to finance investments in community prioritised public goods. So far, thirty-five investments have been made, including rehabilitation and construction of water infrastructure, construction of livestock health facilities and improving access to markets. 
Highlights from a project visit in January 2018 to community-prioritised investments were captured in a 'Twitter Moment', while the latest project activities can be found at www.dcfp.go.tz.

Monday, February 3, 2020

Community voices – the climate needs you in COP26 countdown

The 14th community-based adaption event (CBA14) will call on local communities to use their collective power to hold climate decision makers to account.




Bangkok's low income communities are very vulnerable to climate change impacts (Photo: Siriwat Saisoonthorn, via FlickrCC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A run of international political events in 2019 marked key moments for influencing the climate action agenda, including this September’s UN Secretary-General’s climate summit and the UNFCCC conference in Spain (COP25)
The sequence will continue to build in this “super year” – with a critical UN biodiversity conference (COP15), the maturing of 21 Sustainable Development Goal targets, global ocean treaty negotiations, finishing with climate COP26 in Glasgow when countries will be held accountable to the carbon emissions reduction and adaptation pledges made in 2015.
Nations will be called on to raise their ambition to avoid the escalating climate crisis, including committing enough finance for developing countries to build resilient economies that benefit everyone. 
These events must ensure that communities on the climate frontline get the support they need to build sustainable, successful livelihoods. 
Midway into this series of events, how do things stand? Are these communities getting their asks on the policy table? 
It’s been a mixed bag.
Local people and their representatives have pushed hard to get world leaders to listen to their priorities.
At last year’s annual community-based action event (CBA13), adaptation practitioners, researchers, grassroots representatives and local government planners gathered in Addis Ababa to exchange and develop tangible, locally tested solutions for dealing with the impacts of climate change. 
Debates covered practical ideas for getting finance to the local level, explored how social protection can help people prepare for climate disasters, and how the private sector can be mobilised for adaptation that benefits the most vulnerable. Delegates called for greater participation of women and young people in decisions about spending and resources. 
Many of these demands were reflected in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) 2050 Vision – a bold and innovative plan for how the LDCs are going to achieve a climate-resilient future – endorsed by several developed and developing countries at COP25 in Madrid.
The vision calls for 70% of climate finance to be delivered to the local level and an ambitious "whole of society" approach to responding to the climate crisis. This approach recognises that all society institutions – public, private, customary and cultural – will need to work together to help people adapt to the new and escalating risks caused by a changing climate. 
Community voices also influenced the high-profile Global Commission for Adaptation’s (GCA) Local Action Track. Drawing on evidence of successful programmes from the past, the Local Action Track will seek to push adaptation led by local people up the political agenda. It was launched at last week’s Gobeshona conference

Top-down processes disappoint…

But these steps forward were often lost in the ’noise’ of a broader pessimism around major emitters’ wholly inadequate response to the crisis.
At September’s UN Climate Action Summit, developed countries did not raise commitments sufficiently to meet the urgency called for in the IPCC’s report on the impacts of 1.5°C warming. And COP25 in December saw slow progress with some countries, including the biggest polluters, undermining the talks.
Australia was among the nations frustrating progress at COP25 – while in the backdrop, deadly bushfires continued to rage across the country; the devastation still only meriting a half-hearted government response.

…but bottom-up momentum is building

Amid these setbacks, powerful social movements are building, letting governments know they will be held accountable for their inaction. As people have seen top-down decision making ignore their concerns, they have taken to the streets to demand change.
And this mounting discontent is proving to be a catalyst for change.
Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion can legitimately claim their part in many governments across the world declaring a climate emergency. Meanwhile, once marginal ideas such as the Green New Deal are going mainstream.  
The message is powerful: decision makers take note – you will be held accountable for your climate decision making. Without concerted action – and soon – movements of people directly affected by climate impacts will grow willingness to create greater disruption than ever before. 
The transition to carbon-free, resilient economies is a complex challenge. These kinds of problems can only be resolved by drawing on the knowledge, perspectives and will of the widest range of people and groups, and by building their capacity so they can fully engage.
We will need to consider how to reform our institutions so that greater decision-making power is put in the hands of those most affected by top-down decisions that aren’t working, to enable people to change course accordingly.
We must build climate responses that meet local needs and challenges, not just those of donors or senior ministers.

Communities: bring your voice to CBA14

This year's international community-based adaptation event (CBA14) will bring together climate adaptation practitioners to discuss what these solutions look like. We will explore how to take new adaptation technologies to scale, the role of social movements in working with governments, and how climate finance can flow to the local level – in the right ways and in the right amounts.
Participants will be able to set the standard for what effective participation looks like while building capacity on how to advocate for it. It will be an opportunity to use the strength of the CBA community voice to reflect on how well countries are embracing the transition to fairer economies.
CBA14 will allow community representatives who can’t attend COP26 to be part of a global festival of action, creatively spotlighting what is working on the ground and pushing for greater global ambition. CBA will link up with other key events, including Gobeshona and Development & Climate Days, to feed messages into policy dialogues leading up to the crunch COP in Glasgow.
2020 is set to be an intense year. Five years on from signing of the landmark Paris Agreement there is no assurance that any new policies will meet the needs of marginalised and vulnerable people most heavily impacted by climate change.
Collectively, the CBA community of practice has a voice and influence greater than the sum of its parts, speaking to internationally recognised processes and influential programmes such as LDC Initiative for Effective Adaptation and Resilience or the GCA’s 'Year of Action'.
Join us at CBA14 to add to the momentum that is building for a just transition to climate-resilient future.

Feeling the Green Guilt? You’re Not the Only One

We’ve all done it. You forgot your water bottle at home, so you buy a plastic water bottle at the supermarket. Or you were too tired to rinse out your plastic salad container, so you throw it in the trash bin instead of the recycling bin. Your long-awaited Amazon package arrives in the mail and as the gas-guzzling truck turns down the block you unwrap layers upon layers of plastic packaging for the tiniest item. We’ve all thought to ourselves, “I’m a fake environmentalist” or a friend has joked about us being the sole killer of the environment, or we have consoled ourselves that this one plastic bottle won’t make a difference.
As new emotions and problems arise that we have never had to think about before, our language adjusts to voice our newly discussed fears. So along with the new social media lingo and normie twitter jokes, we can add eco-guilt to the list of words younger generations are handling today.
Ecoguilt is “the feeling you get when you could have done something for the environment, but consciously made the decision not to”. It accompanies the knowledge that there are easily accessible alternatives and the burden that human-caused pollution and industry is affecting our environment in preventable ways. It affects those most often in affluent countries where there are affordable alternatives and where residents have the time, opportunity, and choice to make more environmentally friendly decisions. According to a survey conducted by Vivint.Solar in the United States, it is affecting the younger generations more than the other generations.
The Guilt Report: 2019 Edition has discovered that, of the 2,500 people of varying age and gender surveyed, 79 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds feel guilty about wasting energy. The percentage of feeling guilty decreases the older the participant, shown in the figure below. And the guilt is arising from different sources. Although one of the biggest fears of the climate crisis is access to freshwater, people feel the least guilty about wasting water, with wasting energy and recycling issues climbing above it in the poll.

Obviously, some of the questions proved to be more divisive than others. For instance, 70.8 percent of people felt guilty about throwing recyclables in the trash but when it came to using heating and cooling during different seasons, the percentage of those who felt guilty hovered between 47 and 49 percent. The report also highlighted the performative aspects of being seen by others as eco-friendly, suggesting that it does not play as big a part as some might think. Only half of the people surveyed stated that the knowledge that others were watching affected their eco-friendly behavior. Also, 70.9 percent of people answered that they do not feel the need to compare their carbon footprint to their friends.
So where do we draw our eco-inspiration from and perhaps the most pressure to be environmentally conscious? As shown by the image below, the largest influence comes from our spouses and partners, and the least from our co-workers.


The majority (54 percent) become increasingly stressed and feel guiltier because of news headlines and recent environmental reports. The youngest surveyed were the most affected.
But what can we do to handle our ecoguilt and eco-anxiety? While the headlines and the pressure to do right by future generations can lead to a healthier planet, the most important thing to do is to not feel helpless. We need to encourage one another to do what we can and learn from the experiences of others. What each of us can do will look different. It could mean setting up a community garden using only organic fertilizers and pesticides to provide food deserts with more organic and healthier options. It could mean researching more effective ways to use water in your community and investigating the personal impact of lowering federal environmental standards. It could mean teaching your child’s elementary class about saving water when they are brushing their teeth or packing their lunch in reusable, recycled containers. It could mean voting in as many elections as you can and encouraging your neighbors to do the same through carpooling and volunteering. Whatever it looks like for you, do not forget to communicate your experiences to others, because you never know when you could become the inspiration to change someone else’s habits.
‘It is our collective and individual responsibility … to preserve and tend to the world in which we all live.”
Dalai Lama
To see the full survey conducted by Vivint.Solar, check out the results here and their analysis here.

Arctic Sea Ice on Track for Record Low Levels This Year

Earlier this year, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the Arctic reached the unhappy milestone of 400 parts-per-million. Now, information coming from the National Snow & Ice Data Center indicates that this year’s Arctic sea ice is on pace to shrink to its smallest levels ever.
One of the clearest examples of the effects of global warming and climate change is the receding of the Arctic ice cap. The NSIDC indicates that this year’s sea ice is already slightly smaller than it was in 2010, which was the previous record for this time of year. It is also smaller than it was in 2007, which was the year that had the ice cap shrink to its smallest size in September of that year.
Starting the summer with the smallest Arctic cap on record is not an auspicious sign, for the Arctic or for the planet.
image: NSIDC