Events | Webinar/Presentation

USAID Adaptation Community Meeting: Climate Forecasting Adaptation Backcasting: Promoting Resilient Development in Malawi

Thu,  Feb
19

Event Format

Virtual

Event Date

- (9:00 - 10:30 pm UTC)

Event Location

DC

Participation Eligibility

USAID Staff

You are invited to the USAID Adaptation Community meeting organized by our Climate Change Resilient Development (CCRD) project.

For our discussion this month, our speaker Dr. Brent McCusker, Associate Professor of Geography at West Virginia University, will present research on how households past decision-making strategies inform future adaptation to climate change, with a case study from rural Malawi.

Click here to watch the webinar recording from February 19, 2015. 


Presentation Abstract: One of the most perplexing issues facing climate change adaptation decision makers is how households will respond to both changing climate and changing socio-economic conditions. Research coupling climate change scenarios to future development landscapes is often conducted at broad country or regional scales precisely to avoid this question. Data on household decision-making is often not consistent enough or at too fine a scale to be useful.

In this talk, we report on the outcome of a year-long research study funded by the USAID Climate Change Resilient Development project to begin to address this mismatch. In collaboration with the University of Texas-Austin and the University of Malawi, we generated future scenarios of climate change and then directly asked households how they coped to similar events in the past. We then asked them about the socio-economic factors that most impact their decision making around those climate coping events. Through this technique we are able to anticipate: 1) what future adaptation strategies might look like; and 2) what social/political/economic factors will most likely disrupt the use of past coping strategies in the future. Because communication about climate and weather is critical, we also asked households about the best techniques to provide them with climate information.
The results from this work will be published to a fully accessible public website. In addition to static maps in digital and analog form, 3D animations will be developed to help decision makers better interpret this complex data.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Brent McCusker is an Associate Professor of Geography at West Virginia University. He has published extensively on land use and livelihoods systems in sub-Saharan Africa. His current research focuses on the implications of climate change on rural livelihoods and broader economic development in Malawi. He also works with USAID’s GeoCenter on livelihood vulnerability analysis and mapping across a range of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. Dr. McCusker may be reached at brent.mccusker@icloud.com.

 

Sponsored by

USAID Global Climate Change Office

Upcoming Events