Oxfam Climate Change Adaptation Initiative

Welcome

This is Oxfam’s one stop guide to climate change adaptation. This initiative aims to support Oxfam’s programme staff to integrate Climate Change Adaptation into their work. It provides a theoretical overview of Climate Change Adaptation; it will direct you to additional resources and practical tools; as well as show where different adaptation projects are being carried out throughout the world using a Google Earth interface.

Approach

Oxfam believes that lifting people out of poverty and overcoming injustice is central to our mission, which is why tackling climate change is a major priority for our humanitarian, campaigning, and long-term development work.

The goal of Climate Change Adaptation is to create the conditions whereby people become increasingly able to make informed and appropriate decisions about their lives and livelihoods in a changing climate. In short, the ability to thrive in spite of a changing climate.

Oxfam’s approach to climate change adaptation

1. Communities are at the centre of Oxfam’s approach to Climate Change Adaptation; however, enabling them to adapt requires working across multiple levels from household through to global.

2. In order to build adaptive capacity, factors across all levels that limit adaptive capacity must be addressed alongside actions that actively build capacity to adapt to climate change.

3. Interventions are required that span the range of what is known and unknown about climate change in a specific location. This range starts with addressing the current hazards, increased variability, and emerging trends, and extends through to managing risk and uncertainty of impacts where the direction and scale are uncertain.

Learning Resources

Oxfam Learning Companion – Introduction to Climate Change Adaptation.

Oxfam Research Report – Climate Change Adaptation: Enabling people living in poverty to adapt – summary and full report.

Gender, Disaster Risk Reduction, and Climate Change Adaptation: A Learning Companion.

Programmes and activities

ACCRA – an exciting and ambitious consortium working to improve global understanding of adaptive capacity

Using indigenous knowledge to adapt to climate change in Bolivia

Adapting rice farming to climate change in Northern Thailand

Climate change, poverty and the environment in Malawi

More Oxfam case studies on climate change adaptation can be found here.

Videos

Reports

Oxfam Research Report – Climate Change Adaptation: Enabling people living in poverty to adapt – summary and full report.

Suffering the Science; Climate change, people and poverty. This paper puts the dramatic stories of some of those people alongside the latest science on the impacts of climate change on humans. Together they explain why climate change is fundamentally a development crisis. Link to summary.

More reports can be found here.

Daily Highlights

Oxfam participated in the Fifth International Conference on Community Based Adaptation, which took place from the 24th to the 31st of March 2011 in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

A training day for Oxfam staff on how to use weADAPT was carried out by Stockholm Environment Institute on the 1st of April. For more information on this training, please contact sukaina.bharwani@sei.se.

Oxfam Adaptation Layer

• How do I add my project to the Adaptation Layer?

About Climate Change Adaptation

• Why CCA is important to Oxfam
• Development, equity and urgency
• Key Terms
• How is CCA Approached Globally
• Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change
• Sustainable Livelihoods and Climate Change
• Natural Resource Management and Climate Change
• Gender and Climate Change
• An Approach That Works at Multiple Levels
• Effective Climate Change Adaptation for Oxfam
• Gender roles and Adaptation
• Robust Decision Making Tools for Local Livelihoods
• Key Conclusions on Climate Change Adaptation

Websites we like

• Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance
• Climate Change and Global Warming :: Oxfam GB
• Oxfam International