Home to hundreds of millions of people, the semi-arid regions of Africa and Asia are particularly vulnerable to climate-related impacts and risks. Working in 11 countries in these regions, ASSAR is a research project that seeks to understand the factors that have prevented climate change adaptation from being more widespread and successful. At the same time ASSAR is investigating the processes – particularly in governance – that can facilitate a shift from ad-hoc adaptation to large-scale adaptation.
ASSAR is especially interested in understanding people’s vulnerability, both in relation to climatic impacts that are becoming more severe, and to general development challenges. Through participatory work from 2014-2018, ASSAR aims to meet the needs of government and practitioner stakeholders, to help shape more effective policy frameworks, and to develop more lasting adaptation responses.
ASSAR has recently completed its Regional Diagnostic Study phase which took stock of the current state of knowledge on the extant and emergent climatic and non-climatic risks in Africa and India. During this phase ASSAR explored why different people are differentially vulnerable to these risks and how people, governments and other stakeholders at various scales are responding to current and future climatic and non-climatic challenges.
Conclusions:
Important barriers to adaptation comprise development, gender, and governance dimensions. Among the key development barriers are: lack of integrated water resource planning, extensification of agriculture onto drought prone soils, reduced access to pastoral corridors, increased encroachment of farming onto rangelands, and under investment in dryland areas. Among the key gender barriers are: traditional gender norms that manifest in unequal access to resources and decision-making processes, limited livelihood and technologic options for women, predominance of male migration that leave women, children, elderly and disabled dependents vulnerable to shocks, particularly where remittance flows are weak or nonexistent. Among the key governance barriers are: incomplete government decentralization, top-down policy interventions for managing natural resources that lack local incentives and lock local communities out of resource access, and lack of coordination within national-level institutions and across national to district scales.
Important enablers of adaptation also comprise development, gender, and governance dimensions. Among the key development enablers are: research agendas that increasingly emphasize participatory processes for knowledge co-generation, greater prominence of appropriate technologies for soil and water conservation and natural resource management, and increasing efforts to better channel weather information to local communities. Among the key gender enablers are that adaptation provides an entry point for better addressing the needs of differentially vulnerable groups. Among the key governance enablers are: a significant increase in national policy development around climate change, leadership that is emerging in key ministries, and increasing evidence of mainstreaming of climate into different sectoral policies and strategies