Communities worst affected by the climate crisis are often excluded from the creation and sharing of information needed to adapt. IIED and ACTADE are working to change this, explain Annet Nakyeyune and Susan Nanduddu.
Earlier this month, Hurricane Beryl caused widespread destruction across parts of the Caribbean. As the earliest Category 5 Atlantic storm on record, it highlighted the critical need for more effective long-term support for countries at the forefront of the climate crisis.
This comes at a time when climate change continues to cause substantial damage and irreversible losses within different ecosystems, posing a significant threat to efforts to meet the growing needs of the most vulnerable populations.
Take, for instance, Uganda. Ranked 14th most vulnerable country to the impacts of climate change, it has been experiencing more frequent and severe weather events, yet is one of the least prepared to adapt. Some 68% of Uganda’s population rely on agriculture for their livelihood livelihood but have minimal capacity to acquire and deploy agricultural technology – such as irrigation, fertilisers and improved crop varieties – or the weather and climate information vital for building resilience and coping with climate impacts.
A key line of defence
Wherever one lives, the ability to adapt to changing weather patterns is a key line of defence for avoiding the growing consequences of climate change. Yet, climate adaptation – including the creation of knowledge needed to accelerate climate action – remains largely top-down and continues to alienate local, particularly marginalised, groups who are most vulnerable to climate impacts.
In Uganda, these groups often include women, youth, the elderly, people with disabilities and smallholder farmers. Agricultural adaptation measures are rarely informed by local knowledge, however these communities and groups who depend on rain-fed agriculture urgently need access to appropriate knowledge on how to adapt to more intense and frequent extreme weather events.
The agricultural adaptation knowledge system isn’t currently fit to support the inclusive generation, dissemination and use of knowledge to improve resilience and enable locally led adaptation. One barrier to relevant knowledge creation and sharing is the low level of understanding of appropriate knowledge, particularly weather and climate information, and the demand for such information.
Through our work, we see the communities using this knowledge are largely excluded from the process of its creation. Meanwhile, there are limited opportunities for different stakeholders to interact and facilitate knowledge co-creation, sharing and exchange.
Tackling top-down processes
Local communities and groups in countries such as Uganda have rich local and traditional knowledge about climate adaptation and have informal networks that can catalyse the dissemination and exchange of knowledge. However, their knowledge is not being integrated into the knowledge system.
Since the publicly available knowledge is typically created through top-down processes, local communities and groups are rarely asked critical questions, such as: what information do you have and use to cope and adapt to climate impacts? What information do you need? What relational strategies, such as networks and partnerships, do you have for knowledge sharing and exchange? What works for you?
Such exclusionary processes that fail to build on existing informal structures produce climate adaptation knowledge that is not fit-for-purpose but, instead, is difficult to access, digest and apply. As a result, marginalised groups are unable to build resilience in the face of worsening climate impacts.
Leaving no-one behind
Earlier this year the African Centre for Trade and Development (ACTADE), in partnership with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), launched a new project, to tackle this very issue in Uganda. CRAKS seeks to facilitate the inclusive creation, dissemination and use of climate knowledge in Uganda’s agricultural sector, to build community resilience. It is one of eight projects supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) through the Step Change Initiative, which aims to accelerate equitable and inclusive locally led adaptation in Africa.
A kick-off workshop in Kampala, organised by project partners, was attended by officials from government ministries, local governments, civil society organisations (including women’s organisations and people with disabilities), the private sector and academia. Together, they explored how to devise a mechanism for inclusive creation, dissemination and use of agricultural adaptation knowledge. The discussion focused on what knowledge exists (both traditional and technical), how it is created, which groups are left behind in this process and how to redesign the way we produce, package, disseminate and use knowledge on agricultural adaptation.
Sessions also addressed how to fully involve local voices (especially marginalised groups) in these processes, how to strengthen national and local institutions’ capacity to support knowledge co-creation and dissemination with knowledge users, and how to foster inclusive networks and partnerships for this purpose.
Collective knowledge creation
Excluding knowledge users from the creation of such knowledge, when it is intended to support them in achieving effective adaptation and resilience, produces knowledge that is not usable.
As far as CRAKS is concerned, knowledge creation is a collective activity: but we know that the knowledge ecosystem is complex. If we are to ensure that different stakeholders along the ‘knowledge value chain’ interact, to co-create and disseminate knowledge products in an effective way, then deliberate mechanisms must be put in place to build and strengthen networks, partnerships and linkages. Only then will marginalised groups in Uganda and beyond have the tools they need to tackle the increasing impacts of climate change.
Workshop participants also raised the problem of persistent gaps in the dissemination of available knowledge, often presented within complex, inaccessible documents, and the lack of multi-stakeholder knowledge-sharing networks featuring state and non-state actors. As it stands, there is insufficient access and interaction between stakeholders.
On gender, equality and social inclusion (GESI) – an important component of the project – it emerged that traditionally excluded groups such as women and people with disabilities need targeted approaches to ensure their meaningful inclusion, as well as indicators to monitor progress.
Connecting creators, disseminators and users
For the next three years, partners in the project will facilitate interaction between the diverse stakeholders in Uganda’s agricultural adaptation knowledge system. They will support knowledge co-creation, cross-pollination, translation and dissemination through four broad activities:
- Building strong platforms for inclusive knowledge creation, dissemination and exchange at national and local levels, through stakeholder mapping and network building, with special focus on GESI dynamics
- Packaging agriculture adaptation knowledge into diverse products to meet the needs of marginalised knowledge users
- Addressing gender and social inclusion barriers to effective locally-led agricultural adaptation practices, through stakeholder collaboration and policy influencing, and
- Establishing a robust monitoring, evaluation and learning system to track progress (paying attention to GESI indicators and tracking mechanisms) and to learn from project outcomes to improve policy and adaptation practice.
As disasters like Hurricane Beryl highlight the critical need for more effective support for climate-vulnerable communities, the project offers an avenue for enabling marginalised groups to be an active part of the design and implementation process, facilitating effective response in the face of the climate crisis.
About the Authors
Susan Nanduddu is executive director at the African Center for Trade and Development
Annet Nakyeyune (annet.nakyeyune@iied.org) is a researcher in IIED’s Climate Change research group