Climate Change and Resilience

This article first appeared on the Thomson Reuters Foundation website.

Resilience, as a concept, has re-emerged after a few decades of hibernation as the development term du jour.  While not without its challenges, the approach certainly has merits.

International Alert convenes an expert roundtable, Building resilience – building peace, in Kathmandu on Monday 8 July. It’s the culmination of two and half years of research on the impact of climate change on local communities in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. I can’t be there, so we recorded four minutes to camera as my contribution to the day's events.

International Alert’s latest research, produced in collaboration with the South Asia Network for Security and Climate Change (SANSaC), looks at the relationship between the environment and security in South Asia.

On 15 May, International Alert partnered with the International Peace Institute (IPI) to present findings on environmental change and security at a roundtable event at IPI in New York.

On 7 February, Janani Vivekananda, International Alert’s Climate Change and Conflict Programme Manager, spoke at the Strengthening Responses to Climate Variability in South Asia conference at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC. Janani presented four case studies - on Nepal, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh - to illustrate levels of risk and resilience to environmental change at village level.

Last month saw delegates from around the world assemble in Doha for the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in an effort to inch towards a global deal on climate change. Yet discussions on how much financing should be provided and by whom didn’t reach satisfying conclusions, despite a week’s worth of negotiations.

International Alert in cooperation with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, EU Brussels, and AIM Centre for Development Management, convened an expert roundtable discussion on the security implications of climate change in the Philippines on 24th April 2012.

International Alert’s fifth dialogue on climate change, conflict and fragility, held on 27th January 2012 in London, explored the connections between climate change and community level security, drawing on new research from West Africa and South Asia. During the discussion, participants explored the practicalities of linking top-down policies with on the ground realities in communities already facing complex risks to their human security.

Stories of flood-affected communities in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh, citizens from the disappearing islands of the Maldives and the drought affected communities of the Sahel, all in their own ways struggling to cope with the impacts of climate change are increasingly permeating mainstream consciousness within those countries whose carbon intensive development over the past 100 years has been contributing to these situations.