Key Themes of Local Adaptation to Climate Change: Results from Mapping Community-Based Initiatives in Africa

In Africa as well as in other developing countries, small communities are often the most severely impacted, yet often the least equipped to cope with the effects of climate variability and climate change. Even though the question of what exactly constitutes a successful adaptation to climate change is still unanswered and calls for further research, there is some evidence that many rural and indigenous communities are actively putting into place initiatives to adapt to climate change. But even in today’s Internet age it seems difficult to identify these communities properly as information from Africa is fragmented, outdated or simply not to be found. Yet knowing what kind of adaptation is taking place on the local level is a prerequisite for successful approaches to state-of-the-art adaptation which link bottom-up action with top-down strategies. Addressing this knowledge need, this chapter presents the outcome of a 2010 mapping study on local community-based adaptation to climate change in Africa, illustrating how communities are integrated into local adaptation actions that tackle both development and climate change objectives. To reflect the complex nature of adaptation, the identified initiatives were grouped into two categories—social and economic resilience—and a range of emerging adaptation themes were identified. Comprising 39 local and regional initiatives, the analysis provides some recent examples of concrete local adaptation that may possess a certain potential for replication, upscaling and mainstreaming. In this way, and combined with the continued demand for enhancing the scientific data base to reduce the uncertainty of current climate predictions for the African continent in particular, further research is needed to allow the design of tailored measures to respond to often unique regional adaptation needs.