Top 5 Adaptation Community Meetings from ATLAS

Advancing the field of climate change adaptation requires insight from diverse perspectives, active learning, and creative partnerships. Since 2014, USAID’s Adaptation Community Meetings (ACMs) have served as a platform to share knowledge for climate adaptation and resilience and promote integrated programming.

These ACMs, conducted by the Adaptation Thought Leadership and Assessments (ATLAS) project, brought together development practitioners, academic researchers, government officials, private sector representatives, and other international development professionals working to build climate resilience. The meetings provided an informal platform to exchange experiences and research and discuss challenges and solutions across a range of timely and relevant topics such as gender, conflict, and biodiversity.

ATLAS aims to improve the quality and effectiveness of climate risk reduction by providing targeted adaptation assessments and thought leadership across sectors. One way that ATLAS has built the capacity of USAID and its partners is by sharing knowledge for climate adaptation and promoting climate resilience through these ACMs.

Below you can find the most popular ACMs on Climatelinks, including key lessons learned, accompanying blogs, and the link to the recorded webinar.

5. In Scaling Up Climate Services: Lessons from East Africa, John Parker highlighted his experience working with USAID/Kenya and East Africa’s Planning for Resilience in East Africa through Policy, Adaptation, Research, and Economic Development (PREPARED) Project and key partners to develop demand-driven tools to improve East African climate services.

4. In Improving Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change Through Conflict Resolution: Lessons from Ethiopia, Jeffrey Stark, a conflict and climate change specialist, discussed challenges and opportunities of addressing the climate-conflict nexus in programming. It was based on lessons learned from a recent assessment he conducted of the USAID-funded Peace Centers for Climate and Social Resilience pilot project.

3. Preparing the National Climate Assessment - An Opportunity to Engage included a roundtable discussion of how the international adaptation community accesses and uses climate information, and what this community would find useful in an international chapter of the National Climate Assessments.

2. Ecosystem-based Adaptation for Development Results highlighted key messages from USAID’s suite of resources on ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) as well as examples of EbA projects and approaches in the USAID context, and encouraged dialogue among participants about the use of EbA in their own work.

1. Promoting Gender-Responsive Adaptation to Climate Change is the top viewed ACM from May 2018. The International Union for Conservation of Nature Global (IUCN) Gender Office highlighted their to work to increase understanding of gender issues in climate adaptation strategies through its research under the Advancing Gender in the Environment (AGENT) project.

Do you have a favorite ACM? We would love to hear from you! Let the Climatelinks team know if you’ve used the findings or key messages from an ACM in your work.