The goal of Living with Climate Change: Mapping Experience and Adaptation across the Global South and North (LCC) partnership is to generate knowledge of how those directly affected by extreme social and environmental changes understand these changes, and how this understanding shapes their subsequent adaptation strategies. In particular, we are interested in how different social, environmental and policy contexts affect adaptation strategies, so as to inform policies that can support successful and equitable local adaptations to environmental changes, adaptation strategies that are integrated and coordinated with global strategies and needs. An immediate need is to support local adaptations to these changes in ways that ensure social equity, human rights, and global coordination. The ongoing challenge in the Canadian context remains one of identifying diverse ranges of solutions and approaches that can be mobilized and spread widely across Canadian communities. The Global North, including Canada, has many lessons to learn and absorb from communities in the Global South, and how local peoples elsewhere are adapting to climate change.

 

The consequences of climate change already affect the livelihoods and well-being of
individuals and communities around the world, with those most affected often being from the most vulnerable communities, including women, people with disabilities, and the poor. Adaptations to climate change can reinforce these vulnerabilities and create even greater disparities in social justice within and between communities. Understanding and strengthening equitable and successful adaptation to climate change demands that we understand how specific communities adapt to the changes they experience in their local environments. The goals of this partnership are thus to:
1) deepen our understanding of how and why individuals and communities adopt particular adaptation strategies;
2) understand the role that policies can and could play in shaping or supporting these strategies; and
3) develop methodologies to integrate local community based research with top-down policy information.

 

Given the global nature of climate change, however, successful adaptation also demands
the sharing of information across regions and nations. We will therefore compare and contrast how individuals and communities in different cultures and nations adapt to change as a function of social, policy and environmental contexts, but also compare within communities, as a function of social variables such as gender, disability and caste/social class.

 

This will be accomplished in a partnership that includes three Canadian institutions (York University, University of Toronto, and University of Waterloo) and two community non-governmental research organizations in South Asia, S. M. Sehgal Foundation, India and Women in Environment, Nepal. Each institution has a strong record of collaborative, community-based research and a broad network of community and policy partners for research and/or dissemination. The interdisciplinary team has a collective depth of experience in international team grants and a range of community-based research methods. Each member brings a particular area of expertise to the partnership, about research knowledge or methodology, theoretical knowledge, or knowledge mobilization. Each member has also partnered or collaborated with other members of the proposed partnership in the past as part of other local or international networks, and participated in extensive networks across civil society, academe and government.

 

The current partnership will bring all of these separate networks together into one umbrella group that will work together to generate new knowledge, and also collect and share information about best practices for supportive and pro-people local policies. Ultimately, we intend to build an expanding forum for ongoing collaboration around research into linking local knowledge and adaptation to policy and community development to ensure that individual and community adaptations produce the best outcomes for all community members.

 

This partnership will generate outcomes in five areas. First, the partnership will generate new knowledge regarding how people affected by climate change understand and adapt to the changes they are experiencing, and how these adaptations are shaped and modified by social, policy and physical contexts. In addition to the cross cultural nature of the project, it will also build understanding of climate change in a number of environmental or resource contexts (forest, agro-ecological, coastal, lagoon, mountains, etc.), thereby helping to generate a complete understanding of impacts and adaptation processes. This knowledge will be shared at all levels within the academic community in various ways. The intended knowledge mobilisation will include publications and conference presentations that will be made available to community, civic society, policy makers and teachers in classrooms. We will utilise fact sheets, policy briefs, posters and banners, in addition to media and community publication, podcasts and radio broadcasts.

 

Second, it will create a forum for sharing the voices of those who are experiencing the effects of climate change in their everyday lives. By documenting their concerns, valuing their knowledge, and sharing that knowledge with policy makers and other local communities around the world, we are supporting local people’s ability to participate in local and global decision making that affects their lives.

 

Third, within the broad framework of a mixed method approach, the partners will design innovative methods and tools that can merge qualitative and quantitative data, and participatory and statistical research methods to generate research findings that are locally relevant, useful for policy makers, and comparable across cultures.