Africa urged to “mainstream” home-grown climate adaptation
Africa faces escalating climate risks that threaten livelihoods, ecosystems and hard-won development gains. In response, the African Union (AU), Member States and partners are advancing Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) as a cornerstone for building resilience and climate justice. Yet, adaptation efforts remain fragmented, unevenly financed, and dominated by external priorities. A new study, commissioned by the Global HealthStrategies (GHS) in partnership with the AU Commission’s Sustainable Environment and Blue Economy Directorate, maps, analyses and synthesises scalable and inclusive LLA models across Africa to inform Member States’ positioning under the AU Climate Strategy (2022–2032) and Agenda 2063.
“Adaptation must move from being treated as a project-based kind of environmental issue to being mainstreamed into economic planning and public finance systems and sectoral policy,” says Emmanuel Siakilo, senior climate adaptation and resilience advisor with the AU Commission. In an interview with SciDev.Net, Siakilo warns against “copy-paste kind of interventions” and “pumping money in interventions that don’t necessarily work for the continent”.
He says that locally-led adaptation needs to be contextually relevant and well-coordinated to deliver measurable resilience, adding that interventions must be embedded in national planning and budgeting processes. “Adaptation must move from being treated as a project-based kind of environmental issue to being mainstreamed into economic planning and public finance systems and sectoral policy,” Siakilo notes.
Four critical locally led interventions by politics across Africa needed
With parts of Africa set to experience warming of between two and six degrees Celsius by 2025, climate adaptation is “not only a developmental priority but a survival imperative”, warns the climate adaptation study. The report “The Comprehensive Study on Climate Adaptation Interventions in Africa”, published on the 25thFebruary by the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, identifies four critical locally-led interventions which governments across the continent could embrace. These include climate-smart agriculture and agro-ecological practices, integrated with traditional knowledge, and early warning systems where meteorological data is paired with local response planning.
However, for these interventions to be successful, buy-in is needed from the private sector as well as government, says Siakilo. “The resources that the public institutions have, at national level, are not sufficient to manage adaptation interventions in the continent,” he explains.
“In fact, countries in the continent have been utilising resources meant for critical social sectors like health and education to adapt to the impacts of climate change […] creating more challenges with the communities in these specific countries,” Siakilo adds.He also highlights the importance of including gender, youth, Indigenous Peoples and civil society in climate adaptation, adding that this must go beyond “tokenism”. “We do not just have to be talking about engaging these groups at the consultation level,” he says.
“What is critical here is that participation must influence budgets, it must influence authority. We need to have direct representation of Indigenous Communities, of youth, of gender, of civil society, in adaptation decision-making bodies and spaces.”
(SciDevNet/KnowledgeHub/wi)
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