Adapting to Climate Change
Everything that I read about adapting to climate change seems academic or focused on impacting governmental policy. What I'm hoping to find are two things:
1. How do I know if a project that I'm designing has climate change as an underlying problem?
2. If so, what practical, community-centered adaptation tools, solutions, activities, or interventions are available that I can actually include in my project?

A number of students taking our courses are designing climate adaptation projects -- they just don't realize it. For example, communities that had water 20 years ago suddenly have none as the stream in the ravine behind their community has dried up.

Pastoralists are suddenly faced with extended drought in sub-Saharan Africa and their cattle are dying. Mongolian pastoralists are suffering from a Zud: the Mongolian term for a multiple natural disaster caused by the parching of pastures in the summer followed by bitter cold and thick snow that blankets the land in winter. Roughly 6,000,000 livestock animals will have died by June’s thaw.

So how do we determine if these terrible situations are results of climate change, and if so how do we begin designing our projects to adapt to this climate change?

Be sure and visit our Adapting to Climate Change Working Group.