VSO and Climate Change

More documents

Recommendations

Info

VSO and Climate Change Enlightened government policy and action Systematic and widespread adaptation to climate change requires governments to develop and implement national plans and policies. Without this, progress to build adaptive capacity at the community level risks being piecemeal and unsustainable. With national policies and plans, governments will be better able to access and coordinate available international funding and reallocate internal resources to address climate change priorities. Therefore, VSO will provide support to partners to develop in-country advocacy strategies. Targeted and proactive advocacy undertaken by VSO partners will engage governments to develop and implement pro-poor climate change policies. However, government policies and plans are not sufficient. They also need to be implemented. VSO partners will strive to play an important role in advocating to and supporting governments’ implementation of climate change programs to ensure resources and actions get to those who most need them at the community level. Changes in national policies are needed in the industrialized world as well. As VSO builds its expertise on climate change, it will be able to speak from experience about the need for strong policies and action on climate change and share stories about how to make communities in the developing world more secure and resilient. A number of different advocacy initiatives—often by VSO in coalition with other networks, or through Diaspora and returned volunteers—will try to compel governments in the global North to implement policies and measures that reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases and support the efforts of those in the developing world in adaptation, mitigation, and low carbon energy development. There may also be strategic opportunities to engage in regional or international policy discussions or, in the future, to undertake a global campaign as an organization. However, these should be undertaken only where VSO has a niche that allows both access and influence, and could therefore have an impact on the outcome. Returned volunteers can be encouraged to support international advocacy campaigns that are undertaken by VSO or other international development organizations doing climate change advocacy. A strong and responsible VSO Change will happen within VSO as well. It will be clear from our programmes, communications, and day-to-day office policies and procedures that climate change has been adopted as a key priority. Efforts will be taken to clearly communicate the importance of VSO’s climate change work, especially since many interventions will be integrating climate change into programme goal areas rather than developing programmes that carry the climate change label. Stakeholders and the general public must come to understand that climate change work is an important part of VSO’s activities. VSO will also build its knowledge and capacity on issues related to climate change. This will include hiring staff that have that expertise as well as providing training and resources to existing staff and volunteers. Expertise will be built in areas related to climate change impacts in countries where we operate, the design and implementation of community-based, gendersensitive adaptation projects, including the use of relevant toolkits, and the development of public engagement initiatives. VSO will also take responsibility for its impact on the environment and, specifically, its contribution to climate change in a more comprehensive way. We will measure our ecological footprint and build on environmental initiatives already undertaken by implementing policies to reduce that footprint across the organization, reflecting our concern for those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Various strategies will be used. VSO will build on the office policies already implemented across the federation to further reduce the use of energy and resources. We will investigate opportunities to develop and use sustainable sources of energy. We will undertake an analysis to identify strategies that will reduce staff, volunteer, and partner travel, including commuting. Initiatives could include building our national volunteering programme (which is already providing volunteers at lower environmental costs), expanding green travel policies already in place in London, and developing an e-volunteering programme. Finally, we will explore options for using highquality offsets for those greenhouse gas emissions that cannot be reduced. 8
VSO and Climate Change Case study: Nigeria, climate change and VSO One of the only programmes that VSO has undertaken to date that explicitly focuses on climate change is Building Nigeria’s Response to Climate Change (BNRCC), a partnership between CUSO-VSO (the North American federation member of VSO), Marbek (a Canadian consulting firm), and the Nigerian Environmental Study/Action Team or NEST (the main NGO partner in Nigeria). BNRCC, a programme undertaken between 2007 and 2011, has different components including academic research on the socio-economic impact of climate change and the application of climate change models to more local scales in Nigeria; media and communications strategies to bring climate change stories to journalists and the general public; a policy contribution to the development of Nigeria’s national adaptation strategy; and 15 community-based adaptation projects in different regions of the country. Every community project in Nigeria has unique challenges, but there have been common themes. For example, water availability is currently an important challenge in the semiarid, central part of Nigeria, and even more so in the arid north. In cooperation with NEST and seven local partner organizations, VSO volunteers have supported communities in becoming less vulnerable to water scarcity. In one community alone, rooftop water harvesting systems were installed, water storage tanks were built, water filtration systems were set up, and the capacity of local micro dams was increased. These interventions brought important benefits to this community, especially for the women, who are responsible for water collection and previously had to walk long distances to supply water for their households. The BNRCC’s community-based projects undertook a number of other initiatives, all driven by the stated priorities of community members and the vulnerabilities and impacts they were facing. New drought-resistant and early-maturing varieties of sorghum, millet, beans, maize, cassava and rice were introduced to address changing climatic conditions. More efficient, wood-burning stoves were distributed to women to decrease wood usage, improve indoor air quality, and reduce cooking times. Alternative livelihoods, such as fish farming, snail farming, and small-scale irrigation, were also developed. The lessons learned in Nigeria have been shared with the Ministry through a policy dialogue based on expertise gained at the grassroots level, and this has been able to influence the development of climate change adaptation policy in Nigeria at the national level. Lessons are also being shared with other programme offices and their partners in order to inform the development of their climate change programmes. Case study: Addressing climate change impacts in Bangladesh Bangladesh faces several hazards related to climate change, many of them related to water. Significant portions of the country flood every year due to more intense precipitation events and increased river flows due to melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Along the coastal belt, sea level rise and storm surges from more frequent typhoons have caused salination of soils and water sources. These hazards are likely most severe for Bangladesh’s agriculture sector and, with 80% of its citizens dependent on agriculture for their livelihood, climate change poses major problems for the country. VSO-Bangladesh understands these vulnerabilities and is working to assist communities be more adaptive. Shahana Hayat, country director for Bangladesh puts it this way: “People who are already vulnerable and food insecure are likely to be the first affected. Agriculture-based livelihood systems that are already vulnerable to food insecurity face immediate risk of increased crop failure, new patterns of pests and diseases, lack of appropriate seeds and planting material, and loss of livestock. People living on the coasts and floodplains are most at risk.” VSO-Bangladesh is working to help communities by making research accessible to smallholder farmers at a local level through ‘living laboratory’ approaches to action research. The increased salination of agricultural land is increasing poverty levels. Recognizing that local communities need to develop alternative sources of incomes, in 2010 a VSO volunteer worked with these communities to identify viable options, which included adapting the cultivation of sweet water fish species to cultivation in salt water. The volunteer then worked with local fishermen, youth club members and the Fisheries Department to develop a model of cultivating sweet water fish in the saline water, which was appropriate to the local context. Eighty community and youth club members have now been trained on this model and are able to pass on skills for fish cultivation to other communities also affected by salt water intrusion. 9
Page 1 and 2: VSO and Climate Change ©VSO/Simon
Page 3 and 4: VSO and Climate Change Introduction
Page 5 and 6: VSO and Climate Change VSO’s appr
Page 7 and 8: VSO and Climate Change Integrating
Page 9: VSO and Climate Change Where we wil
Page 13 and 14: VSO and Climate Change Glossary Ada

VSO and Climate Change

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?