Fostering agency to adapt to climate change
The Climate Centre has more than a decade of experience in strengthening resilience and adaptation. Community resilience has been internationally recognized as a vehicle for local adaptation to changing climate risks and the Climate Centre strives to support scaling up community resilience worldwide, in line with IFRC’s road map.
The Climate Centre was a founder member of the Partners for Resilience (PfR) alliance since 2011. PfR consisted of more than 50 organizations and the alliance was active in 11 countries from 2011–2020. The partners spurred climate action around the world and generated excellent examples of adaptation for and by the Red Cross Red Crescent.
PfR still continues to collaborate in 2021 to promote transformational change in the face of rising disaster risk, climate change and environmental degradation.
The original 2011 PfR vision of integrated risk management centred on moving beyond business as usual towards an integrated approach that combined disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation and ecosystem management and restoration. The partners also mainstreamed inclusivity and gender to ensure the voices of women and other marginalized groups were taken into account and that they were empowered as agents of change.
With a strong focus on strengthening capacities, the Climate Centre was able during PfR to develop further guidance on climate-smart programming (also available in Spanish and French), which cuts across many of our themes, for instance in resilience, DRR and health.
The Climate Training Kit was also entirely renewed, aiming to support National Societies and their partners to deliver inclusive adaptation on the ground. Module 2c on community resilience and climate offers tools and approaches to invest in integrated risk management.
It also included support to designing and rolling out the IFRC’s Enhanced Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment toolbox for participatory community planning that also considers climate risks and the role of ecosystems and landscape as risk modifiers.
Over the past decade, the National Societies in the resilience initiatives have been positioning themselves towards their governments to support the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Action, the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, as overarching ways to address risking risks and aggravated vulnerabilities due to the climate and ecosystem crises.
PfR has created an online library with many further tools and case studies of Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, Mali, Philippines, Indonesia, India, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Haiti.
In 2014, the Climate Centre also joined the UK-funded BRACED alliance, which aimed to help people become more resilient to climate extremes in South and South-East Asia and the Sahel, and neighbouring countries. The Climate Centre imlemented knowledge management, aiming to contribute to a sustained and transformational impact on people’s resilience to climate extremes, beyond communities directly supported by funded projects.
This was done through generating evidence and learning on resilience from across the BRACED programme to inform and influence the policies of practitioners, governments and funding agencies. This guide details more information about BRACED knowledge management and the tools it used.
