ASSAR: Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions

14 May 2014
14 May 2014

ACDI is leading a large five-year project funded by IDRC and DfID that aims to improve understanding of climate change in semi-arid areas across Africa and Asia. ASSAR is funded through the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA) , a seven-year, $70 million research initiative to understanding climate change and adaptation in some of the most vulnerable regions in Africa and Asia.  Through this initiative, four consortia will conduct research in three types of “hot spots” – regions where demographic trends and strong climate signals put large numbers of people and their livelihoods at risk: semi-arid regions, deltas, and Himalayan river basins. The ASSAR Consortium will be working in the crucial climate change “hot-spot” of Semi-arid regions, characterised by intrinsic biophysical and socio-economic vulnerability to a range of stresses, and severe projected changes in climate over the coming decades. 

The ASSAR project has five lead organisations, and a number of collaborating partners:

  • University of Cape Town, consortium and lead, and lead for the Southern African research
  • START Washington/Ghana, lead on research training and the West Africa research
  • University of East Anglia, lead on East Africa research
  • Indian Institute for Human Settlement, lead on S Asia research
  • Oxfam UK, lead on research into use and knowledge transfer
  • Collaborators include University of Botswana, University of Namibia, Reos Partners, the INTASAVE partnership, the Red Cross/Crescent Climate Centre, University of Ghana, ICRISAT, African Wildlife Foundation, University of Addis Ababa, Watershed Organisation Trust, Indian Institute for Tropical Meteorology, Ashoka Trust for Ecology and the Environment.

The ASSAR research aims to:

  • understand how climate change might interact with other factors to affect the poor and vulnerable in semi-arid areas;
  • develop a better understanding of what works and doesn’t in building adaptive responses to climate change;
  • identify the scientific, technical, social and political-economic barriers and enablers for effective adaptation, from local to national scales.

The research will take place in four semi-arid regions – Southern Africa, West Africa, East Africa and South Asia –and will take a multi-scalar approach, looking at the regional, national and local level and exploring how vulnerability, adaptation and the political-economic factors at play at these different levels interact and affect each other.

ASSAR’s research questions are:

  1. What are critical determinants and drivers that shape vulnerability of people in SARs to differential impacts from climate change and variability across nested scales? In particular, how is the vulnerability of the poor and marginalized differentially affected?
  2. How are the consequences of current and future climate change understood and communicated across scales, from local communities to national and regional institutions? What new approaches can be developed to lead to more effective shaping and communication of climate messages across south-south regions?
  3. What approaches have been/are being used in developing adaptation strategies, at different scales, and how effective have they been, in particular, in helping vulnerable groups responds to longer-term climate change risks? Where are the critical knowledge and capacity gaps in accessing, contextualizing and acting on climate information across scales?
  4. How might climate change in future, and what are the consequences for society? What information is available from state-of-the-art climate and impacts assessment models to quantify future risks and impacts? How reliable and relevant is that information for purposes of adaptation planning at high spatial resolution and different time scales?
  5. How might the existing social, political-economic and governance determinants and drivers of vulnerability to climate alter or intensify and what new risks and opportunities could emerge and interact?
  6. How best can adaptation be planned in the face of inevitable biophysical and socio-economic uncertainties?
  7. What are the barriers and enablers for effective, long-term adaptation, and what interventions/investments are required to enable more widespread, sustained adaptation?

ASSAR will be trialling a number of innovative approaches to answer these research questions:

  • a Transformative Scenario Planning (TSP) social learning process that enables players to understand holistically the biophysical and political-economic system they are part of, and then to develop strategies that can change the vulnerability of the system to climate change;
  • the TSP process will also be used as a research instrument to identify social and political-economic barriers and enablers for successful adaptation;
  • research on barriers and successes for effective communication of climate information and knowledge, via social learning and game playing;
  • the development through the research process of local adaptation plans of action, that are fundable and ready to implement, through sources such as the Adaptation Fund; 
  • stress-testing of adaptation strategies and plans in virtual, survey-based and behavioural experiments;