Real tools for community design of Anticipatory Action for Adaptation
Example of community driven Anticipatory Action to make Adaptation Sustainable
Communities can be directly involved in design of anticipatory action.
We can ask communities what years they experienced problems from droughts, and compare that to what the forecast would have said in those years to see how accurate the forecast would be to trigger action.
In one example, we saw that the forecast would have predicted drought for about 2/3 of the droughts that the communities remembered but miss 1/3 of the drought.
Group discussion:
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Would you have used that forecast for anticipatory action?
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What would you do about the years it diddnt work?
Potential value of Anticipatory Action: making adaptation more sustainable
Adaptation can be vulnerable to climate risk
Consider an agroforestry project, with government and donor investments, and a community of farmers dedicating 30% of their farmland land for the forest.
In a normal year, the community gets their agricultural yields, as well as sustainable products from the agroforestry.
In a bad year, agroforestry products can help them manage decreased yields.
In a very bad year, they may need more than the forest can offer, overextracting from the forest and making it unsustainable.
Could Anticipatory Action before the forest is overextracted help make the forest sustainable?
Instead of simply providing a study, leadership, communities and experts can work together to see what adds up, in a simple framework that can be compared against what is realistic, to see how far things can be pushed before they stop working.
Play with this dashboard, which can utilize community input, and generate games with key parameters and tradeoffs that can be played by the community to explore what might work.
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Would you do this adaptation project?
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Would you use anticipatory action to help make it sustainable?
Pop out the Sustainability Dashboard