Programme / Year Phd /Third Year
Name Jake Wilson
Programme / year PhD /third year
Project title: Connecting Climate Justice and Climate Change Adaptation: The Case of Food Security
Background to the Project:
The most recent Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014) raised the spectre of the problems faced by the world’s poorest, most food-insecure people being compounded as never before by the impacts of climate change. The fifth Assessment Report presents a far more accurate picture than its predecessor of the impacts of climate change now and in the future upon agriculture and food security. Climate impacts are unevenly distributed: tropical regions with a high proportion of the world’s food-insecure people are likely to bear the brunt of reduced yields (Vermuelenet al., 2014).
The thesis considers a relatively recent framework for conceptualising climate change which can be called the climate justice approach, focussed on the fact that the most vulnerable people in the world to climate change are also least responsible for climate impacts and least in a position to do anything about them.
There is a moral responsibility to act both to mitigate the drivers and to adapt to the consequences of climate change (Jamison, 2010; Schinkel, 2011). Adaptation with reference to systems bearing upon food security was chosen as a focus since the largest amount of adaptation projects in the world’s poorest countries relate to food security and associated sectors. This does not necessarily limit the scope of inquiry to agricultural activity, since the determinants of vulnerability to food insecurity extend into economic and sociocultural contexts, as well as being themselves located within specific ecological systems and agro-ecological systems.
What is the Project researching?
The overall aim of the thesis is to apply a climate justice lens to adaptation to climate change in sub-Saharan countries with relevance to food security and water resource management, to determine the utility of such an approach for enhancing sustainable development and increasing resilience.
In addition to scrutiny of climate change literature relating to adaptation, food security and climate justice, an in-depth examination of National Adaptation Plans of Action for sub-Saharan Africa was undertaken to produce a typology of adaptation responses in relation to water and food security.
The secondphase of research takes Malawi as a case study example of an approach to adaptation which often seeks to incorporate conceptions of fairness and equity within it. Part of the research seeks to determine how first-round Climate Justice Fund projects in Malawi have made communities more resilient to and aware of climate impacts, and improved their quality of life.
What are the findings so far?
The first stage of work examined the premise that there is a broad correlation between levels of fairness and equity evident in the National Programmes of Action of 21 Least-Developed countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the prospects for success of priority actions proposed to address adaptation to climate impacts and food security.
Malawi was identified from the analysis of the NAPAs and the typology of adaptation responses as a country with a high level of equity and fairness embedded within its proposed adaptation programme. Elements considered within the analysis, and its triangulation through interviews with stakeholders, included food security, equity/ equality, mitigation and adaptation, funding, and sustainable agriculture.
Adaptation strategies which focus upon increasing adaptive capacity while building in equity of access, and as a function of distributive justice, carry a greater likelihood of achieving climate justice for the most vulnerable populations.
References
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2014) Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, IPCC: Geneva.
Jamison, A. (2010). ‘Climate Change Knowledge and Social Movement Theory’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(6), pp.811–823.
Schinkel, A. (2011) ‘Causal and Moral Responsibility of Individuals for (the Harmful Consequences of) Climate Change’, Ethics, Policy & Environment, 14(1), pp.35–37.
Vermuelen, S. et al. (2014) Info Note: Climate Change, food security and small-scale producers, CGIAR: Montpelier.