Climate Change & Agrobiodiversity Research

Natureandpoverty.net and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) invite you to share practices and case studies on Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA).

Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) integrates the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services into an overall strategy to help people adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change. It includes the sustainable management, conservation and restoration of ecosystems to provide services that help people adapt to both current climate variability, and climate change.

Natureandpoverty.net is supporting IUCN collect practices on EbA. These practices will constitute an important source of information for future members of the Ecosystems and Livelihoods Adaptation Network (ELAN), a research-driven and action-oriented network of institutions, committed to delivering innovative and practical ecosystems-based solutions to climate change, based on the latest information and the diffusion of knowledge among network members. ELAN is a joint initiative by IUCN and WWF-US, financially supported by the McArthur Foundation. To learn more, about EbA you might want to refer to the IUCN publication titled, “Ecosystem-based Adaptation: a natural response to climate change” under the ELAN.

We invite you to share your practices and case studies. Tell them your stories and share your experiences on EbA to help others in their work. To facilitate documentation of practices a EbA Practice Format has been designed and is also available on the Natureandpoverty.net website in French, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia.

Send your contribution by completing the questionnaire and return it to: email hidden; JavaScript is required.

Practices can be directly submitted on the Natureandpoverty.net platform using this link. In case you opt for on-line documentation of your practice please be sure to refer to the addendum in the questionnaire with call specific questions.

No Time to Recover – CARE and Save the Children UK from CARE and Climate Change on Vimeo.

Watch more on a channel of videos brought to you by the CARE Climate Change Information Centre (supported by CARE International’s Poverty, Environment and Climate Change Network).

In December 2009 while in Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change delegates from the Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research met with delegates from the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC) to discuss agrobiodiversity in Africa. IPACC is composed of 155 community based indigenous peoples’ organisations in 22 African countries and operative in six geographic and cultural regions: North Africa, West Africa (Sahara), Sahel-Horn, Central Africa (Rainforest), East Africa and Southern Africa.

Prior to COP15 IPACC leaders from East and Central Africa met in Bujumbura, Burundi. The leadership from Gabon, Cameroon, Chad, Burundi, Rwanda, DR Congo, Uganda and Kenya prepared an IPACC statement for COP15, dealing with both adaptation and mitigation. The core message is that indigenous peoples are acutely affected by climate change, they have valuable knowledge about the environment and adaptation, and they are willing to be partners in finding national and global solutions to this crisis. Now they need African states to recognise them, as required under the African Charter and the UN Human rights standards. Read the full IPACC Statement to COP 15 / Déclaration de l’IPACC lors du COP 15.

Click here to find IPACC’s latest info, publications and videos for COP15

The International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) compiled a list of documents that place issues of gender and climate change together and presented them in Copenhagen. Women are generally poorer and enjoy less financial security than men. It is primarily women who care for children and the elderly and are seldom in positions of power. In fact, in developing countries, most work in the agriculture sector. They are most vulnerable to climate change and it’s impact yet women were not mentioned at all  in the Kyoto Protocol. That must not be the case at COP15.

• Gender in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung)
• Gendered Impacts of Climate Change – A Human Security Dimension (Energia)
• Gender and Climate Change Impacts in Viet Nam (United Nations in Viet Nam)
• Protocols, Treaties and Action: the ‘Climate Change Process’ through Gender Spectacles (Energia)
• Gender & Climate Change in the North: Issues, Entry Points and Strategies for the Post-2012 Process and Beyond (Gendercc)

Climate change will have a disproportionate impact on poor rural people because they lack institutional and financial capacity to withstand the effects. Poor, vulnerable people face economic loss due to crop failures and livestock loss.  The international community, having agreed on adaptation, mitigation, technology and financing as the response to climate change, must include poor rural people as part of that response.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), whose main goal is to help rural poor people overcome poverty, has integrated adaptation and mitigation practices into most of its programs. This document includes examples of progams such as a biogas waste-to-energy project in China and a resource management project in Peru.

Photo: www.ifad.org

On 7th July 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hosted a one day meeting among professionals from FAO and other Rome-based agencies (IFAD, WFP, Bioversity) working on climate change adaptation to informally exchange technical knowledge in an interactive way and to get inspiration and ideas on how to improve our work and to enhance different forms of co-operation on substance issues of mutual
interest.

Objectives of the meeting included:

• Highly interactive discussions of key questions in climate change adaptation (raised by the participants) and sharing of lessons learned.
• Seek concrete feedback on ideas related to current and future work on climate change adaptation and the way we work.
• Getting to know better people within FAO and from other Rome-based agencies working on climate change adaptation.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research’s (CGIAR) newsletter highlights the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) submission to the UNFCCC that suggesting an agricultural initiative similar to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), establishing funding mechanisms to realize agricultural mitigation potential, and better integrating soil carbon sequestration into land use and land-use change and forestry accounting. The newsletter also features Bruce Campbell, Director of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, who stresses that some adaptation activities can be addressed immediately through improved and better-coordinated research, systematic global data collection and dissemination, and strengthened knowledge of local conditions to be shared among similar environments.

On 18 June 2009 almost 140 runners answered that question as they raced down from the Imja Tsho glacial lake near Mt. Everest to the Sherpa village of Khumjung (about 35km away) in the Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal. The Imja Tsho Action Run event was organized by Sherwi Yondhen Tshokpa, a network of Sherpa students, and supported by sponsored by a variety of non-profit organizations such as iDEAS and the community of Khumjung, WWF-Nepal’s “Climate for Life” campaign and ICIMOD. The lead sponsor was The North Face.

What a race! Everyone in the village and present played their part to take action in the arduous fight against global warming and climate change and to make for successful events. To kick-off the day, monks from the Khumjung Monastery led a sacred dragon and lion down from the hillside to bring peace and prosperity to all and chase away bad luck during the event. They kept everyone safe and succeeded brilliantly in energizing the crowd and line-up of events!

Read more about this extraordinary first time event in the Khumbu and how it relates to climate change on the IUCN WCPA Mountains Biome Network blog. Download a copy of a documentary film about the Imja Tsho Action Event 2009 – CLIMATE CHANGE: A Mountain Community Dares to Take the First Step .

You can also download a copy of the beautiful film (in “.iso” file format, 1.5gb) about the Imja Tsho Action Event 2009 from iDEAS. Listen to an action update video statement about climate change and mountain communities.

Take a tiny glimpse at A Spectacular Teaching Opportunity – Imja Tsho Action Run and Khumjung Festival, June 2009 – Khumjung’s monks, sacred dragon and lion do their part to help the village learn how to respond to rapidly-melting glaciers and climate change in the Himalaya.

The second “Imja Tsho Action Event 2010″ will be held on 10-11 June 2010, please join in and support the local Sherpa efforts and action in the global race against climate change.

Beat the GLOF Event and Save the Himalaya Khumbu Festival will be held in Khumjung village on 4 June 2010 instead of 10 – 11 June. The event date has been postponed for the convenience of the guests of 3^rd International Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) Day Celebration on 29 May 2010, who could also participate in Beat the GLOF Event and Save the Himalaya Khumbu Festival. The event will be celebrated with various programs focusing on mountain communities,  environment and the impacts of climate change on them. The event will be supported by iDEAS, Nepal Tourism Board, Sagarmatha National Park and many non government organizations.

More than 200 scientists and policy makers attended the UNCCD 1st Scientific Conference held in Buenos Aires, Argentina 22 to 25 September 2009. This scientific conference was co-organized by the Committee on Science and Technology (CST) of UNCCD and was chaired by William Dar, Director General of  International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and with the Dryland Science for Development (DSD) consortium chaired by Mahmoud Solh, Director General of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

This was a historic event. Science was able to influence policy and decision making at global and national levels.  The key message was that combatting land degradation is central to mitigating and adapting with climate change as well as being able to ensure food and nutritional security. Land matters and sustainable land management will be key approaches to combat desertification, degradation and drought much more in dryland areas of the world.

The imminent convergence of desertification, climate change and crises in food, biodiversity and population is creating a “perfect storm“, said William Dar, DG of ICRISAT and chair of this scientific conference.

It is of crucial importance to highlight the Benefits of Sustainable Land Management. The full report is open for comments until 31 October 2009.

July 23, 2009 — Kemal Derviş testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on America’s critical role in supporting climate change adaptation in the world’s most vulnerable communities. A forthcoming policy brief, to be released in the fall of 2009, will further highlight key recommendations to enact globally accepted policies to effectively tackle climate change and protect those most affected.

Excerpt from his address is given below while the full speech can be accessed by clicking this link.

“A second, conceptually distinct, argument for urgent and ambitious action is grounded in the fact that the world’s poorest people—those who are least able to cope—are going to suffer the most and soonest from climate change’s adverse effects. Climate stability is in one sense a perfect example of a global public good, because a given quantity of heat trapping gas emitted in Chicago, Beijing or London, or for that matter anywhere in the world, will have the same effect on atmospheric concentrations. The impact, however, these concentrations have on climate experienced in any given location as well as the effect of changes in climate on human well-being will be quite different from one region to another.”