What is your SIDS Region (Pacific, AIMS or Caribbean)?
Caribbean
Give examples of what actions you are undertaking to reduce poverty, food insecurity and nutrition challenges in response to climate change and climate-related events? Actions can range from informal to formal and include social protection and multisectoral policies, projects, programmes, activities, among others.
Context is necessary. My interests and actions mainly concern research and outreach in marine small-scale fisheries (SSF) and marine protected areas (MPAs). Most are project linked and hence short-term. They have included:
· Promotion of the global SSF Guidelines at regional, national and local levels to strengthen policy
· Policy influence to include SSF and MPAs in regional climate policy and implementation plans
· Capacity development and empowerment through training, learning by doing, fisher exchanges
· Exploration with stakeholders of adaptive MPA governance options to enhance system resilience
· Understanding fisherfolk perceptions of climate and poverty, and views on risk and resilience
· Examining what fisherfolk do to cope with, or adapt to, new perturbations such as sargassum
· Looking at the links between fisherfolk networks, food security and marine resource governance
What lessons have you drawn from building resilience and adaptive capacity of the poor and vulnerable people in the context of climate change and climate-related events?
Some lessons have included:
Fisherfolk normally accept high levels of risk; so understand why rather than make assumptions
Building adaptive capacity is a long-term process more suited to programmes than projects
Conservation interests such as environmental NGOs can unintentionally undermine resilience
Applied academic research needs to be coupled with outreach and advocacy to have an impact
Fisherfolk have little stamina for policy influence as a long term undertaking; need early results
Rates of climate change and variability are likely to far outstrip adoption of adaptive governance
What are the challenges you face in reducing poverty and inequalities and building the adaptive capacity of the poor and vulnerable to climate change and climate related events?
Some of the challenges are:
· Gender, poverty and youth issues receive very little attention in fisheries and are not mainstreamed
· Low capacity for social science in fisheries and MPA authorities limits the types of matters addressed
· Few gender and poverty scholars have an interest in marine natural resource management issues
· Fisherfolk do not usually consider themselves poor although very sensitive to economic inequalities
Several other responses largely elaborate upon the experiences underlying the lessons learned. Much overlap.
What should the world learn from your experience? What are the plausible pathways and good practices you would recommend to follow when addressing poverty, food security and nutrition in the context of climate change and climate-related events?
Lessons learned are set out above. Some are generalizable, but others are more specific to Caribbean culture and social-ecological situations. Pathways are many and need to be adapted to the conditions at different levels on geographic, institutional, jurisdictional and temporal scales. A key principle is institutionalizing a culture of testing, monitoring, evaluating, learning and adapting to test again. Identifying plausible pathways and good practices leading to resilience or transformation for addressing the listed threats requires detailed knowledge of the specific situations to avoid or reduce collateral damage. The primary pathways are those that lead to adaptive capacity and enable improved self-organisation. Good practices need to be participatory but well-informed and strategically aimed at adaptation. Here, well-informed means sufficient to take a reasonable decision and assess the outputs and outcomes against an ideal. Further specifics require context.
Patrick McConney