Award Recipients: 2023 International Joint Initiative for Research in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation

Climate change will mean more people on the move as extreme weather threatens lives, destroys property and ruins livelihoods. Most people will move from the countryside to the city. However, some will change their local mobility patterns, or take up seasonal migration to find work elsewhere. Others may choose to stay and adapt to the changing conditions. Climate mobilities is a term used to describe these diverse migration responses to climate impacts.

This project works to support city and municipal councils in preparing for diverse climate mobilities. City mayors are considering how to invest in infrastructure and city planning for climate-related migration. However, unless the actions they take are driven by the priorities of the most affected, they may end up making things worse for people. Therefore, this project focuses on what a desirable future home and neighbourhood would look like from the perspective of those on the move and the communities that host them. Traditionally, such information has been difficult for planners and policymakers to include in their existing decision making structures. Therefore a key part of the project is to understand how to weave the information we gain from the precariously housed into the metrics and indicators that governments would be more familiar with. In this way, the project provides entry points for policymakers to carry out more transformational projects that address underlying poverty and inequality.

The research takes place in four locations, investigating different climate mobilities:

1. Highly climate change-exposed Inuit communities who do not want to leave;
2. Rural climate-related migrants moving to the Kathmandu in Nepal;
3. People displaced by flooding in Durban, South Africa; and
4. International migrants in London, UK who fall through the cracks in the city’s adaptation actions. The project uses community-led and arts-based research methods that value and elevate the knowledge of people on the ground. The project also engages local municipalities and regional and national governments to ensure that such knowledge is incorporated into future adaptation planning."

This research aims to bring Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing together from the First Peoples of Canada and Norway to address climate change risks to source waters, fisheries and food systems, and riparian management. Indigenous communities and peoples are experts of their environments and carry intimate knowledge about water and related resources. These knowledge systems have enabled the resilience of Indigenous peoples and communities since time immemorial. Climate change is a disruptive threat that will require sharing of knowledge through traditional practices and scientific knowledge and innovation.

In this project, we want to

1. investigate Indigenous-led approaches to water governance and stewardship and
2. develop methods for the inclusion of Indigenous and local knowledge and risk mitigation in water management and restoration practices in Canada and Norway to build climate resiliency for Indigenous communities.

We will explore traditional and current governance approaches in partner communities and explore using the lens of water safety planning to develop an understanding of climate change risks to water resources and services to co-develop long-term stewardship adaptation strategies. The risks addressed include:

• Risks to water security
• Risks to critical infrastructure, networks and services
• Risks to human health (health impacts arising from the accessibility and quality of drinking water)
• Risks to food security (water quality impacts on freshwater/estuarine fisheries)
• Risks to coastal socio-ecological systems (sea-level rise)

We will work with Atlantic First Nations institutions and communities in Canada (Unama'ki) and in Norway (Sápmi). The outcomes will challenge some of the existing governance models around water resources and services common in the dominant national structures and identify approaches that are more aligned with the communities’ traditional knowledge and long-term perspectives. The intention of this work is to challenge governance norms and legitimize Indigenous ways of knowing and caring for all relations in a changing climate.

The rise of global surface temperatures is causing extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and storms. Designing the built environment for environmental sustainability and high resilience against extreme weather is crucial to face the challenges of the future rapid increase in climate-related disasters, especially in areas inhabited by vulnerable populations. Such design calls for holistic, inclusive, regenerative, and self-sustaining approaches which result in an overall net positive impact on the environment and the communities living in it. The design addresses how to reconcile climate resilience with net zero GHG emission-built environments, whilst restoring biodiverse ecosystems and fostering social cohesion. This project proposes an interdisciplinary approach to develop strategies for the implementation of such an urban design in vulnerable communities, focused on risks related to coastal socio-ecological systems, critical physical infrastructure, and water security. The general objective is to co-design a framework to implement solutions in case studies (living labs) that boost the adaptation to the new climatic and socioeconomic conditions of the areas. A novel participative design methodology will be used, promoting institutional and citizen dialogues to collectively craft solutions responsive to the people’s needs and to generate opportunities that reinforce and transform the social fabric. Our living labs aim to optimize the engagement of marginalized communities in the co-design and implementation of durable solutions, building a sense of ownership of the recovered urban space. Based on sustainable, innovative, and traditional construction techniques, such solutions will address three specific objectives:

1. climate change adaptation of vulnerable infrastructure;
2. regeneration of urban ecosystems;
3. promotion of biodiversity.

Three case studies will be developed in close collaboration with local partners in communities exposed to risk related to sea level rise, coastal flooding, and extreme rain episodes and storms in Colombia, Indonesia, and the USA Gulf Coast. The resulting strategy will be replicable in other built areas facing risks resulting from a fast-changing climate, contributing to the development of strategies for sustainable, inclusive, and resilient communities. Equity, diversity, and inclusion are taken into account in the team composition, recruitment, research, training, and development opportunities.

Countries of the Global South and Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to climate change, partly due to reliance on local, wild-caught foods. At least 54 species of toothed whales are consumed across 86 countries worldwide and the practice is increasing. Yet, toothed whale harvest often occurs in remote and understudied regions, leaving a large gap in knowledge of whale populations, their contamination and nutritional value, and their socioeconomic importance to communities, particularly in the context of accelerating climate change.

WhaleAdapt is an international collaboration of researchers and local organizations in Canada, the US, Denmark (Greenland, Faroe Islands), and St. Vincent and the Grenadines that uses cutting-edge approaches combined with local ecological knowledge (LEK) to address the overarching question – how can vulnerable communities reliant on whale consumption adapt successfully to shifting marine resources due to climate change? – by addressing five objectives that address four key risks:

1. Investigate past, present, and future distribution and relative abundance of North Atlantic toothed whales using LEK and habitat suitability modelling (Risks addressed: Ocean ecosystems, Food security);
2. Use chemical tracers to evaluate the trophic roles of toothed whales across the North Atlantic and study climate-driven changes (Risks addressed: Ocean ecosystems, Food security);
3. Assess concentrations of key contaminants and nutrients in harvested whales, and improve knowledge on contaminant sources and pathways via isotopic tracers (Risk addressed: Human health);
4. Inform the sustainability of harvest based on genomically-determined population size, structure, and demographic history (Risks addressed: Ocean ecosystems; Food security);
5. Co-develop knowledge on the economic and cultural value of harvested whales relative to newly available cetaceans, other wild foods (e.g., fish), and store-bought foods. (Risk addressed: Living standards).

WhaleAdapt is engaged and integrated with the most vulnerable groups from the tropics to the Arctic to address key risks through novel interdisciplinary approaches. This unique pan-North Atlantic study will help communities across three countries make a sustainable, healthy, and socioeconomically viable adaptation to shifting marine resources. Results have broad implications for national agencies and international agreements on climate change, biodiversity, and pollution.

The project focusses on flooding of coastal and riverine communities due to sea level rise in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries of Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Lucia. It aims to build resilience to flooding through understanding the connectivity between terrestrial, freshwater and coastal systems and the affected people. It will support improved policy and governance structures, and deliver decision support tools that reduce the social, economic and environmental damages as a consequence of climate change. The project will be co-designed with communities, national and CARICOM regional agencies that undertake flood monitoring, adaptation and mitigation, and non-governmental agencies providing flood relief. The interdisciplinary team comprises natural/social scientists and engineers from Canada, UK, US, and researchers from the Caribbean. Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI) are considered in the team composition, training plan and community involvement. The proposed research is based on highly innovative science in socio-economics, dynamically coupled human-water systems modelling, coastal and tidal modelling, river basin and land-use modelling, wholescape integration, nature-based solutions, stakeholder participation, integration of risk in decision making, flood hazard mapping, and development of flood forecasting and warning software, along with digital communications tools to support flood control and relief. Research questions are:

1. What are the projected sea level rise, coastal dynamics, and tidal fluctuations expected in future climate scenarios?
2. What is the extent of disruptions to human populations, economies, health, and livelihoods due to flood inundations?
3. What are the socio-economic drivers and coping mechanisms to flooding by coastal and riverine communities?
4. Using adaptive management, what types of flood control and adaptation mechanisms are required to cope with future flooding scenarios?
5. What are the government policies, institutional frameworks, land use and zoning regulations and social networks required for resilience?

The outcome is a CARICOM Flood Resilience Framework, leading to the following changes and impacts:

• A co-developed Risk Hazard Prediction and Response Model;
• Capacity developed in the communities, government agencies and local universities;
• Improved policies and institutional frameworks for flood risk planning and management;
• New knowledge in inclusive co-designed flood control systems.

Migration is becoming a survival, coping, and adaptation strategy in regions where livelihood systems are either compromised or offer better opportunities to climate migrants. New waves of climate migration to specific climate resilient ‘hotspots’, not least urban centres, is impacting pre-existing socio-economic vulnerabilities, and precipitating hardships and unequal outcomes, for the individuals and households resettling to these areas. Achieving just and resilient outcomes will require engaging key stakeholders e.g., migrants and host communities to proactively prepare and plan for these climate-induced movements.

This project aims to explore, design, and recommend co-produced adaptation strategies for reducing socioeconomic vulnerabilities (SEVs) and building resilience for vulnerable climate migrants and host communities across 5 Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) and Great Lakes Region (GLR) urban cities of Kampala, Mwanza, Eldoret, Detroit, and Hamilton.

CLARS’ multisectoral team of researchers, practitioners, and their local networks uses mixed-method, interdisciplinary approaches involving participants from both lakes-regions to generate detailed locally co-produced knowledge and data, to provide knowledge exchange and climate adaptation and resilience strategies and policies that improve migrants and host citizens’ socioeconomic vulnerabilities for national governments, cities, and multilateral organizations. The project consists of five integrated work packages that:

1. Examines the effectiveness of international and national policy responses to climate change and operationalise recommendations that meet the socioeconomic needs of climate migrants.
2. Produces and shares LVB and GLR urban climate predictive data and scenarios on urban migration flows, that assess risks and socioeconomic protective factors and quantify climate impacts.
3. Co-develops inclusive climate adaptation and resilience strategies that avert, minimise, and address climate migrants’ socio-economic vulnerabilities in both lakes-regions.
4. Stimulates knowledge exchange to advance co-production and learning, inspiration and sharing of climate adaptation and resilience strategies and policies that improve migrants and host citizens’ SVEs across LVB and GLR urban settings.

Outputs will include a wide range of scholarly outputs, databases, policy briefs and training sessions of researchers in LVB, GLR, the UK, Germany, and beyond.

Extreme heat is expected to become more frequent and intense amid global climate change. Older adults' physiological and socioeconomic vulnerabilities make them particularly susceptible to the adverse health and well-being effects of increased temperatures. For example, extreme heat can lead to dehydration and exacerbate chronic conditions common in old age, such as respiratory problems and diabetes. The last two decades have seen a 54% increase in heat-related deaths among older adults worldwide. It is thus imperative to mobilize various sectors of society to address the key risks to older adults' health and living standards. Successful adaptation and mitigation measures require input from older adults to inform on resources, demands, and challenges at the individual and community level.

This project integrates strategies targeting older adults (individual level; relevant health-protective behaviours) and their environments (community level; effective and accessible community-based programs) to enhance their preparedness for extreme heat. We aim at constructing localized, yet comprehensive adaptation and mitigation plans with older adults and community partners including local health care authorities and senior service providers. Taking a participatory approach, older adult representatives co-lead the research team with academics and partners in third/public sectors in Canada, the United Kingdom (England and Scotland), Sweden, Israel, and Hong Kong. Our interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research activities such as daily life assessments, focus groups, and community engagement will integrate scientific knowledge about extreme heat and their impact on older adults into a comprehensive plan for individual- and community-level response actions, taking into account contextual differences across countries.

This project has important impact: First, it will help allied professionals to co-create age-friendly cities under the United Nations (UN) Age-friendly Cities Framework and address the UN Sustainable Development Goals including good health and well-being, climate actions, and sustainable cities and communities. Second, findings will help improve community services by drawing on local older adults' lived experiences to develop plans catering to their needs under extreme heat. We will actualize the vision of the UN Decade of Healthy Aging (2021-30) while acknowledging older adults' resilience to and their role as active agents in a changing climate.

Globally, agriculture covers 40% of the earth’s surface and food systems are responsible for one-third of humanity’s contribution to global climate change. Yet, smallholder and subsistence farmers are among the most vulnerable to climate change, with extreme weather events and related food price volatility affecting livelihoods, biodiversity, and food security at multiple scales.

This project builds on transdisciplinary research on agroecological transitions in vulnerable farming communities in Canada, Germany, India and Brazil. We will examine the influence of agroecological networks (farming organizations, institutional actors, and consumer groups) in promoting the perennialization of agriculture to support climate adaptation (improving resilience in livelihoods and food security) and mitigation (increasing carbon sequestration).

Perennialization of agriculture integrates annual and perennial crops and trees into the same farming system. Compared to annual cropping systems which currently dominate global agriculture and markets, perennial crops show promise for climate adaptation and mitigation because of their contributions to carbon sequestration in tree biomass and soil organic carbon, and their buffering effects against soil degradation, drought, and other forms of extreme weather and climate variability.

From a social wellbeing perspective, agroforestry and other diversified perennial systems offer opportunities to adapt to climate change and escape poverty traps, including higher and more stable farm incomes, balanced agricultural labour across growing seasons, improved working conditions compared to more input-intensive forms of agriculture and improved nutrition and health.

Using a participatory action research approach, this project will use a novel methodology to test the relationships between personal, political, and practical leverage points driving the adoption of agroforestry and other practices supporting agricultural perennialization. We will sample farms and organizations in each case study across a diversification gradient from low-diversity farming systems to perennial and agroforestry-based management systems. We will then use qualitative and quantitative methods to assess climate resilience outcomes and estimate the potential of scaling adoption of perennial and agroforestry practices. A cross-case synthesis will take local institutional, environmental, and relational contexts into account to inform decision-making.

In cities around the world, the uneven impacts of climate change-induced extreme events such as heatwaves and wildfires are acutely felt indoors. Research on indoor environmental quality is emerging but often overlooks the social, political, and legal determinants of the built environment and health. An important co-determinant of health is housing. In many cities, housing is increasingly unaffordable and unfit for a changing climate. Tenants are left sacrificing safety for affordability because the buildings least prepared for climate change are often the most affordable. Tenants have little control over their units and cannot easily access adaptation measures. Senior tenants who are low-income, disabled, and/or racialized are particularly vulnerable – compounding their compromised physiological response to environmental threats. Governments have introduced programs to increase access to cooling (e.g., retrofits, free air conditioners). But if not accompanied by proper tenant protections, these initiatives could lead to displacement or rent hikes, meaning that adaptation and mitigation efforts could create unintended negative and inequitable outcomes for health and living standards.

We strategically combine the insights of environmental health and climate justice to study the indoor environments of senior tenants’ homes and foster equitable climate action. This requires interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral research to measure and create livable thresholds, prototype justice-based interventions, monitor implications of new climate policies on housing, and support community-based climate resilience measures. In Barcelona, New York City, and Vancouver – three major coastal urban centres facing the intersecting crises of climate and housing – we will pursue four initiatives:

1. measure indoor environmental quality and its impact on health;
2. implement and evaluate in-building communal ‘climate safe’ rooms;
3. monitor the unintended outcomes of climate adaptation and mitigation policies on tenancy;
4. identify mechanisms that may lead to climate-related rent increases or displacement.

Together, these initiatives provide environmental, health, and social data to 1) inform public discourse that propels adaptation and mitigation efforts without displacing or disempowering senior tenants, and 2) safeguard the right to secure, high-quality housing in the context of climate change especially for those facing environmental and social injustices.

Coastal Mangroves in Eastern and Western Africa offer coastal communities much-needed ecosystem services and protection against key climate change risks, including risks to low-lying coastal-ecological systems, risks to terrestrial and ocean ecosystems, and as a result, risks to food security. Coastal communities are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts because of

1. their location being highly exposed to sea level rise and erosion,
2. poor socio-economic conditions, and
3. their high dependence on mangrove ecosystems. Coastal Mangroves however are highly threatened both by anthropogenic and climate change pressures.

The main objective of the project (CoastMan) is co-production and uptake of a Multi-Criteria Decision Support System (DSS) that provides vulnerable communities and decision-makers a knowledge-based decision-making capacity for the restoration and conservation of socio-ecological systems. An interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral team is established from researchers and stakeholders from across three continents (America, Europe, and Africa), in partnership with vulnerable groups to co-develop and uptake a DSS to promote mitigation and strategies that enhance the adaptive capacities of the mangrove socio-ecological systems in Eastern and Western Africa. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from extensive field research in coastal Tanzania and Ghana, extensive literature, and remote sensing, the project will

1. co-develop dynamic maps of drivers and risks of mangrove habitat loss,
2. support locally-led social-ecological and climate resilience through coordinated management of mangrove resources,
3. co-develop sustainable livelihood strategies for coastal communities,
4. co-design a novel multicriteria framework for mangrove restoration and conservation, and
5. co-develop a novel DSS for mangrove socio-ecological systems.

We devised a co-production and dissemination strategy so that project outputs will assist in identifying mitigation strategies and enhancing adaptive capacities of the frontline coastal communities, including building their capacity needs in designing climate actions such as restoration and conservation of mangrove ecosystems. Furthermore, the project will lead to improved knowledge and capacity of partner institutions through supporting early career researchers and promoting strengthened collaboration between partners and vulnerable coastal mangrove-dependent communities.

More than two billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress. By 2050, that figure may reach 3.2 billion. Changing climates affect water security for daily needs, livelihoods and culture (Risk #7) and increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather like floods and fires which can disrupt critical infrastructure like roadways and pipelines necessary to provide water for peoples’ wellbeing (Risk #3).

While initiatives by our collaborators and others develop technologies to address immediate water risks, there is no framework to assess future climate vulnerabilities of non-professionalized water systems. To address this gap, we will use data-driven vulnerability assessments to inform mitigation and adaptation strategies. Our research objectives include describing:

1. the systems that ensure water security,
2. the climate vulnerabilities in those systems, and
3. the opportunities for creating and maintaining climate-resilient water systems.

We will support our partner communities in Turkana, Kenya; Nile region, South Sudan; Varanger, Norway; and Indigenous communities in Alaska and Western Canada to develop their Water Security Action Plan and to

1. map their water systems and its climate vulnerabilities, and
2. implement and evaluate interventions that augment their water systems’ resilience.

Further, we will create a Global Water Resilience Toolkit to inform policymakers at the regional and local levels to advance similar Water Security Actions Plans with vulnerable groups elsewhere so that our approach can be scaled for the 3.2 billion people who may face water insecurity by 2050.

Understanding that water security is a trans-disciplinary challenge spanning health, livelihoods, security, culture and science, our diverse team includes engineers, landscape architects, policymakers, local NGOs and Indigenous knowledge-holders, including four Co-PIs from Canada, Norway and the USA, five academic and three non-academic Co-Applicants, and five implementing partners. Our team has a track record applying context-specific approaches to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) at our research sites, informed by trust-built partnerships with our community and local implementing partners. We will rely on our Performance Metrics, Management, and Results Framework to track and evaluate our findings, EDI practices, partnership strategies, and the effectiveness of our contributions to local and global policy and practice.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change promotes conservation agriculture as a cost-effective way of mitigating climate-related risks to food production. However, smallholder women farmers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face barriers to adopting this strategy, including limited access to land, capital, training, and gender-based societal stereotypes. Global policy initiatives have often prioritized the viewpoints of advanced economies, overlooking the realities and constraints of vulnerable communities in LMICs. Smallholder women farmers are particularly marginalized and left out of crucial discussions regarding the effectiveness of climate-resilient agricultural systems.

Our project uses a participatory action research methodology to investigate how conservation agriculture can empower smallholder women farmers and mitigate climate-related risks to their

1. living standards,
2. food security, and
3. health.

This advanced qualitative approach is designed to engage participants throughout the research process, allowing us to co-produce a practical set of policy interventions to tackle climate change in LMICs. The project team includes an interdisciplinary group of experts from Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and Canada seeking to address the following research objectives:

1. To understand the various conservation agriculture practices used by smallholder women farmers in two LMICS, Nigeria and Brazil, focusing on their benefits, limitations, and the socioeconomic resources needed for better outcomes.
2. To empower smallholder women farmers by addressing their socioeconomic vulnerabilities (e.g., poor access to funds and skill enhancement opportunities) and physical challenges (e.g., limited access to modern agricultural tools).
3. To co-produce an actionable set of evidence-based policy recommendations to promote climate change resilience and enhance the socioeconomic status of smallholder women farmers in LMICs.

Our work plan is divided into two research phases. Phase 1 will focus on exploring the lived experiences of smallholder women farmers using qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and focus groups. In Phase 2, we will organize multi-stakeholder workshops, training, and pilot funding to enhance climate change resilience among smallholder women farmers in LMICs. Our goal is to identify practical adaptation strategies and best practices that can be implemented in other national and global settings.

Au Maroc et au Bénin, dans les entreprises agricoles peu mécanisées et pauvres, les sécheresses et les écosystèmes affaiblis détruisent les récoltes et menacent la sécurité alimentaire et les revenus. Au Canada, plusieurs fermiers affrontent sécheresses, grêle et verglas. Le projet vise à caractériser les vulnérabilités des petites entreprises agricoles et à développer des options d'adaptation et d’atténuation, tout en dotant les fermiers d’outils de réduction des risques climatiques. L’initiative regroupe 400 fermiers, 15 entreprises et 10 chercheurs (génie, économie, hydrologie, agronomie, biologie, géographie, éducation). Encadrés par la pensée design, approche participative centrée sur les besoins des usagers, des exploitants du Maroc, du Bénin et du Canada partageront en sous-groupes (femmes, hommes, jeunes) leurs vulnérabilités et les adaptations déjà implantées. Les exploitants des trois pays, en tandem avec l’équipe scientifique, chercheront ensuite des solutions pour augmenter leur résilience. Des outils numériques faciliteront la démarche :

• groupes Facebook (pour échanges de solutions et d’expériences),
• webcams (pour voir les situations),
• drones et SIG (systèmes d'information géographique, pour détecter carences en nutriments, stress hydrique…),
• jeux sérieux «immersifs» (pour simuler sur téléphone les mesures d’adaptation possibles).

Des solutions tels les cultivars résistants aux chaleurs et capteurs de carbone, l’ajout de biodiversité et les techniques d’irrigation novatrices seront échangées entre les participants des trois pays et les scientifiques. Intégrant les meilleures solutions trouvées, des mesures d’adaptation et d’atténuation seront expérimentées sur 15 parcelles locales (les « Jardins partagés ») puis discutées entre les participants internationaux. Une grille multicritères coconstruite avec les entreprises évaluera les mesures implantées et la technique « The Most Important Change » (Davies et Dart, 2005) détectera les améliorations dans les compétences et les pratiques.

Des mesures propices au contexte des petits exploitants émergeront du projet, qui est original par ses outils d’échange et de prédiction: pensée design, drones, SIG, webcams, groupes Facebook, jeux sérieux. Pour disséminer les pratiques gagnantes, des programmes de formation seront offerts aux associations agricoles, avec les organisations gouvernementales. Enfin, les participants discuteront avec les élus locaux des politiques liées à l’agriculture.

Vanuatu is an 83-island archipelago that, like most Pacific Island Countries, contributes minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions but is among the countries most impacted by climate change. Increased exposure to cyclones and sea-level rise, combined with extensive low-lying areas, are endangering the scarce freshwater resources. Although Vanuatu citizens have responded and adapted to climate conditions for centuries, rapid changes related to climate and a growing population are causing significant and unprecedented stresses on water resources, which in turn negatively affect health, food security, living standards, human mobility and coastal systems.

The project’s objective is to secure freshwater resources for Vanuatu’s most vulnerable populations. Specifically, it aims at

1. building adapted methods for water resources evaluation in Vanuatu and other Pacific countries, and
2. designing and implementing context-specific adaptation and mitigation strategies to ensure the sustainability of water resources. This interdisciplinary research will focus on two representative groups of islands. The first are small low-lying islands where freshwater lenses are highly sensitive to climate change and sea-level rise. There, without viable alternatives, water scarcity causes multidimensional issues such as migration and cultural loss. The second are large islands where most of the country’s population lives in urbanised areas. There, population and water demands have grown rapidly and are likely to increase due to climate-induced migration.

The project’s trans-sectoral approach, based on socio-technical systems theory, integrates natural sciences, including efficient and innovative methods based on the hydrological cycle, and social sciences, notably to incorporate local knowledge into management processes. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, climate projections at the island kilometer scale, hydrogeochemical investigations, hydrologic modeling, as well as ethnography, interviews with key informants, focus groups and observations, the project team will formulate recommendations on adaptation and mitigation strategies and measures. The team will select, implement and monitor the most relevant measures according to the traditional mode of management, in a participatory manner. The project will strengthen knowledge and capabilities of the project team, which includes local and national representatives, through a knowledge mobilization strategy.

Access to energy is critical to the wellbeing of individuals, families, communities, and businesses. However, transition of fossil fuel-based energy systems is essential to avoid runaway climate change, and the physical infrastructure that transports and delivers energy is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change that have already begun to materialize. This project focuses on enhancing energy transition planning, recognizing that such plans must: integrate mitigation and adaptation; embrace a justice framework; and be socio-culturally embedded within local geographies. This demands direct engagement with the diverse peoples living and working in those spaces, with special attention to vulnerable groups. Empowerment and engagement of marginalized community members reduces inequity and conflict, increases legitimacy, and allows for deployment of valuable local knowledge, all of which are essential to the realization of mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development goals.

Our primary objectives are to

1. co-produce directly applicable knowledge to facilitate local climate adaptation planning that prioritizes justice and wellbeing;
2. generate scalable knowledge to support capacity-building, enabled by a comparative approach. We will pursue these objectives with a mixed methods comparative analysis of local capacity to respond to key climate-attributed risks across an internationally diverse set of communities.

In each case, we will assess key risks; identify a range of regionally-appropriate options for mitigative/adaptive energy transition; pursue community-engagement to identify collective visions for equitable, livable communities based on local needs, values, and practices; and map enablements and constraints to the realization of those visions.

Case studies represent equity-deserving Indigenous and marginalized communities uniquely vulnerable to climate change in Canada, the U.S., Norway, Germany, Mexico and Ghana, each of which hold in common three key climate risks: critical infrastructure; living standards; and peace and human mobility. One or more members of our team already has organizational partnerships in each of our case communities, enabling rapid deployment of research activities.

Our international research team includes leading and emerging scholars spanning multiple disciplines, each of whom is uniquely qualified for and committed to interdisciplinarity, collaboration, community engagement, and equity, diversity and inclusion.

The impacts of climate change on mental health are profound, cumulative, widespread, and increasing globally. Adverse mental health impacts from climate change are pervasive and include acute effects from wildfires, floods, droughts, and storms; enduring effects from chronic, slow-onset changes such as sea level rise, coastal erosion, and sea ice decline; vicarious experiences via media and family; and unintended consequences of climate change solutions. These mental health outcomes are significant and interrelated, and include anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, mood and behavioural disorders, addictions, suicide, sleep disruption, ecological grief, and the erosion of underlying determinants of mental wellness. These complex, cascading, and compounding pathways are linked to climate risks to low-lying coasts; ecosystems; physical infrastructure, networks and services; living standards; human health; food and water security; and peace and human mobility (i.e., IPCC’s representative key risks). Although widespread, these mental health impacts are inequitably distributed and deeply unjust. Effective responses and bold actions that implement visionary thinking, creative innovation, paradigm-shifting transdisciplinary and anti-colonial approaches, and unprecedented collective and collaborative efforts are urgently needed.

The Climate Mental Health Research Initiative (CMHRI) mobilizes international transdisciplinary expertise to:

1. innovate methodologies and advance research on climate change and mental health, particularly for vulnerable groups;
2. inform climate policy, shape practice, and accelerate action;
3. develop capacity and train the next generation of climate change and mental health leaders; and
4. connect and leverage existing networks and communities of academics, governments, NGOs, practitioners, and the public to enhance the coordination of science with decision-making.

Across these goals, we focus on risks to mental health and living standards. Research priorities include understanding complex, cascading, compounding, and severe risks; super-leverage points; and climate resilient development pathways. By delivering world-class science, developing new approaches and methodologies, integrating research with action, and harnessing the power of the collective, CMHRI addresses the intersecting social, economic, equity, and justice challenges that underpin mental wellness and resilience to foster transformative action.

This project focuses on developing climate mitigation strategies for water and food security risks. We will address risks related to the (W1) changes in cultural water uses of Indigenous Peoples/ local communities in relation to their worldviews; (W2) lack of powerful medium (e.g., art) that evokes empathy to facilitate and inspire change; (W3) water quality deterioration and eutrophication as a result of industrial activities, intensive agriculture and rapid urbanization in Indigenous communities in Canada and in low-lying coastal regions in the Philippines; and (W4) lack of wastewater treatment technologies in Indigenous communities.

Specific food security risks to be addressed include the

• (F1) poor awareness of sustainable stonewalled fish traps in South Africa that hinders its adoption as a climate change adaptation strategy;
• (F2) lack of inclusive management of marine cultural heritage sites, leading to loss of traditional fish trap socioeconomic benefits;
• (F3) lack of national synthesis, weak public awareness, and poor policymaker literacy on the interconnected decline in the Philippine coastal water quality, fisheries food supply, security, and safety; and
• (F4) poor understanding of the impacts of colonial and capitalist politics on food sovereignty for Indigenous communities. To do this, we will prioritize Indigenous knowledge and teachings, including Nêhiyawak (Plains Cree) and Zapotec teachings to guide the development of water quality monitoring programs and water/wastewater treatment technologies; body-land approach to co-produce strategies that highlights Indigenous women’s knowledge and the centrality of the land and body connection to Indigenous peoples facing water and food security challenges in northern Canada and Southern Mexico;
• pre-colonial fishing practices to challenge post-colonial African thinking and inform contemporary epistemes and praxis in knowledge development; community-based participatory research to shape an “Alternative Futures Vision” in Philippine fisheries management;
• and Indigenous contemporary art practice as an intellectual inquiry tool on water. Although the approaches appear as case studies, they are mutually informative as they allow for comparative analyses, cross-validation of findings, identification of best practices, and most importantly, the contextual adaptation of practical knowledge.

Indigenous Peoples and vulnerable Local Communities (IPvLCs1) are on the front lines of climate justice; in addition to experiencing the biophysical stresses of climate change , we/they are also facing many costs associated with the decarbonization of global economies. These stresses for IPvLCs are growing in many parts of the world. Often it is women, and those with physical disabilities who are the most significantly impacted. This trend has been described as “green colonialism” by Indigenous leaders.3 Examples include lithium and rare earth mineral mining for electric vehicles, flooding and resettlement caused by hydroelectric dam construction, and carbon capture initiatives.How can the Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) of IPvLCs contribute to innovations for a more equitable energy transition? Our research Team addresses this question with the aim of producing innovations that can transform climate change policy (nationally and globally) but also contribute to food, water and land security (i.e., contribute to peace and reduce forced mobility).

Although vulnerable, IPvLC leadership and our/their knowledge systems (ILK) have been the foundation of food-water-land security and innovation for centuries if not thousands of years. ILK includes the worldviews, values, practices and institutions (customary laws) that have developed over generations by IPvLCs about ecosystems and social-ecological relationships. Our gender and culturally diverse, interdisciplinary research Team is led by Indigenous leaders from IPvLcs We are also a Team of academic experts from more than 10 disciplinary foundations with decades of experience in collaborative research with IPvLCs on the core issues of this proposal. Moreover, we have a strong network of intersectoral connections with national and global agencies. Three focal points of work are planned from 2024-2027:

• We will collaborate with IPvLCs to document multi-scale patterns of climate stress and ‘green colonialism’ in 8 biocultural regions based on ILK,
• (Obj. 1), support IPvLC leaders to catalyze innovations that decarbonize the economy and increase food-water-land security
• (Obj. 2); mobilize outcomes to policy actors at local-global scales
• (Obj. 3). By 2027, we aim to have an interdisciplinary vision on how IPvLCs around the world are coping with climate change through mitigation and adaptation strategies to inform decision-makers about urgent actions to be taken based on ILK.

Low-cost fossil fuels have enabled an explosive growth of food production. Although this has enhanced economic growth and human well-being, the negative consequences of the shift are now evident in climate change, which is disproportionately increasing food security risks for vulnerable groups. Low cost, highly processed foods are displacing traditional foods, resulting in undernutrition and malnutrition. Displacement of Indigenous Peoples and other disadvantaged groups to marginal lands has increased their susceptibility to increasingly extreme climate change events, such as droughts, flooding, and heat waves. Marginalization has led to greater risks of economic and gender-based exploitation, impoverishment, and food insecurity.

We propose a mitigation and adaptation strategy to reduce harmful emissions from food production and use Indigenous knowledge to enhance food security for vulnerable populations. The Reimagining Food Systems (RFS) project brings together Indigenous, local, and inter-disciplinary knowledges to test circular economy and other integrative approaches to small fish, wild rice, and traditional medicinal foods. The application of integrative approaches, principles of distributive justice, and closed-loop environmental design will reduce climate change impacts and associated socio-economic externalities.

RFS investigates the potential effectiveness of interdisciplinary interventions in two inter-related thematic areas:

1. Indigenous circular bio-economy strategies to fish and other “foods as medicine”; and
2. harnessing small fish to directly meet the needs of vulnerable groups.

With the experience of Indigenous peoples as the starting point, Theme 1 brings ethical and practical insights of Indigenous knowledge about sustainability and food security. Theme 2 highlights the biological and nutritional potential of small fish to further climate adaptation and justice. The design of the RSF project and the interdisciplinary composition of the team will lead to an innovative range of linked interventions. These include support for extreme climate resistant food sources, shorter value chains to benefit rural and remote Indigenous communities, women fish traders and marginalized consumer groups, integrated food production systems, institutional realignments to promote direct human consumption of nutritious traditional foods, and interactive, digital, cultural-twin educational tools for truth, reconciliation, and social justice.

Indigenous Peoples globally face profound threats from climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation — threats that are rooted in discrimination, land dispossession, and colonization, and span all of the IPCC’s representative key risks. It is primarily through the nexus with Indigenous food systems that these stresses converge and interact to affect health and well-being. Indigenous knowledges and practices underpin resilience across the food-climate-health nexus, yet they are overlooked and undermined by government policy.

New ways of working with Indigenous communities and informing decision making are needed if we are to make sense of and address these interlinked stresses. The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON) transforms and rethinks how we understand the food-climate-health nexus from the bottom-up, building on multiple ways of knowing embodied in Indigenous knowledges and science, and in ways that strengthen community resilience to multiple stresses and support actions that benefit Indigenous Peoples. We will develop, operationalize, and maintain Indigenous Observatories that are composed of community leaders, Elders, and youth, decision-makers, and researchers among Indigenous communities across the global south and north, and spanning all of the UN's seven social cultural regions. The Observatories will document, monitor, and examine the lived experiences, stories, responses, and observations of how climate stressors interact with food systems, health, and well-being across partner regions and communities as they play out in real-time and across seasons.

This allows us to tease apart the complexity of factors and drivers affecting community resilience and vulnerability and how they differ between and within communities, across seasons, and over time, rooted in the world views and cultures of our Observers. We will co-generate knowledge and capacity to inform policy development and catalyze actions that build on community strengths and address potential vulnerabilities. The Observatories provide a vehicle for strengthening the capacity of communities to document their own knowledge on the links between climate, food, and health, and a space to dialogue with decision makers at regional, national, and global levels on what actions are needed to build resilience. The global scope of IPON provides a grounding for developing scalable insights to inform decision making and advocacy for our partners in UN and Indigenous organizations.

Climate change is having a detrimental impact on the physical and socioeconomic systems that are crucial for the well-being of vulnerable groups living in flood-prone and water insecure regions worldwide. The growing complexity and unpredictability of river system water flow regimes, quantity, and quality caused by climate change are impacting those living upstream and downstream. Currently, there is a gap in ways to blend scientific knowledge of the physical effects of climate change as measured through tools and modeling advancements, and the local knowledge of vulnerable communities about the available and success of mitigation and adaptation options. A part of this gap is in activated bias intervention. Moreover, this knowledge gap has not been integrated into the socioeconomic systems that drive place-based actions for climate mitigation and adaptation, especially in vulnerable communities.

Many vulnerable communities, such as Indigenous, coastal, urban elder and youth populations, and those downstream of mine closures, are struggling for water security which generally means the right amount of water of sufficient quality at the right time and place. The objective of this collaboration is to use design thinking workshops facilitated with bias and inclusivity experts to co-develop adaptation and mitigation options based on salient place-based climate change scenarios. The scenarios and mitigation options will become plot points in applied theatre productions where audiences will decide on preferred actions and thereby direct the outcome of the play. Design thinking harnesses the knowledge and insights from users of a service to prototype solutions to a problem and typically involves three phases: Inspiration (Empathize and Define), Ideation (Prototype and Collaborate) and Implementation (Test and Deliver).

Blending design thinking, applied theatre, natural and climate science, with socially engaged researchers will create four novel touring plays in water insecure regions. Our design thinking workshops and the plays will be embedded with social science tools to capture, analyze, and enhance the co-production of new knowledge such as bespoke scenarios, and place-based adaptation and mitigation options to be shared with policy makers in each region. The applied theatre will bring audiences into decision spaces where they consider a range of locally relevant options for mitigation and adaptation to enhance water security in their local watersheds.

The project uses a participatory, feminist, and community-led approach to understand how climate change is affecting human health, livelihoods, and well-being in communities in coastal Bangladesh. Using methodologies that centre the affected population, the research explores climate change risks and impacts from the perspectives of vulnerable and marginalized populations. The research team and community members will co-generate and test community-led, culturally-appropriate, and sustainable mitigation and adaptation responses.

The research focuses on communities in the Chittagong and Cox’s Bazaar regions of Bangladesh that are adversely impacted by their physical and socio-economic vulnerabilities to climate change. These communities are affected by risks to low-lying coastal socio-ecological systems (e.g. seasonal flooding, landslides), risks to living standards (i.e. poverty, well-being, livelihoods, inequalities), risks to human health (e.g. malnutrition, mortality, disease, mental ill-being), risks to food and water security, and risks to peace and safety caused by involuntary migration and displacement. Women and adolescent girls, whose lives are disproportionately affected by climate change, have been left out of mitigation and adaptation efforts and decision-making. This research privileges the perspectives and priorities of these women and girls, while supporting their leadership and agency in planning and carrying out mitigation and adaptation responses.

An interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral team of gender and climate change researchers, experts, and practitioners from Canada, the United States, and Bangladesh, in partnership with vulnerable communities, will co-create knowledge and communication strategies to address climate change vulnerability. The first phase of the project uses participatory research methods to document multi-faceted and intersecting risks in selected communities. How these risks affect marginalized groups with intersecting inequalities on the basis of gender, class, age, caste, ethnicity, religion, disability, and geographic location are explored. Members of marginalized groups work with the research team to develop potential adaptation and mitigation approaches. The second phase of the research focuses on testing and documenting these community-based adaptation and mitigation approaches. A local, women-led non-governmental organization leads the implementation of efforts at a community-level.

Climate change adaptation includes building futures that integrate community and scientific knowledges. Through community-based design research, this project develops climate smart Indigenous food gardens in primary schools in three South African ecoregions located in KwaZulu/Natal, Gauteng, and Limpopo provinces.

The approach aims to enhance social protection by addressing three interrelated and disproportionately distributed climate change risks: food insecurity risks due to drought and precipitation variability; human health risks due to malnutrition; and risks from water-related hazards to food production. By situating participation in gardening practices within community-embedded schools, this project fosters climate responsive communities while building intergenerational climate literacy that brings interdisciplinary agricultural and climate science knowledge together with Indigenous and Local Ecological Knowledges (ILEK).

The project assembles an interdisciplinary team of Canada-, U.S.- and South Africa- based researchers with expertise that includes community-based research, climate justice education, culturally responsive STEM and literacy education, garden-based science learning, agricultural sciences, climate scenario modelling and child health assessment. A community-based co-design research approach will structure our work such that planning for impacts on climate smart gardening, child health and wellbeing and intergenerational climate literacy is a collaborative, sustainable, systems-focused process guided by contributions from multiple stakeholders working alongside the research team. Stakeholders contributing to co-design, implementation and knowledge mobilization at each site include children and caregivers, ILEK keepers, school partners, NPO and NGO collaborators, traditional leaders, and provincial and national South African governmental partners.

A key goal of this design-based project is an adaptable model for scalable ILEK-integrated climate-smart food gardening for social protection. By co-designing climate-smart school gardens with vulnerable Black communities, an important contribution is in the enactment of Environmental Data Justice where geospatial modelling data, agricultural remote sensing data and ILEK are in sustained dialogue to inform local agricultural practices. This is a form of climate justice with potential for high reward in creating and sustaining conditions for equitable and values-driven climate data practices.

Rapid changes in Arctic sea ice have led to the emergence of unpredictable conditions that impact travel by Inuit, leading to increased accidents and adverse effects on their food security, health and wellbeing, economy, culture, and identity. Warming air temperatures, along with shifting ocean currents and weather patterns, have shortened the length of time when sea ice is seasonally stable, affected ice roughness, and produced new cracks and areas of thin ice and slush obscured by surface snow. In order to meet the urgent climate adaptation needs of Inuit we propose to develop tools that combine sea ice observations with local travel practices that are grounded in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit knowledge and values; IQ).

These tools will incorporate innovations in sensing technology that make possible the implementation of both surface- and satellite-based Earth Observation (EO) data for scale-appropriate, user-specific, sea ice information delivery. This project uses a cross-cultural and Inuit-led partnership approach (Sikumiut-SmartICE model) to co-develop new EO and environmental data-based tools for identifying seasonally and spatially dynamic sea ice features impacting safe travel. These tools will meet the following criteria:

1. they are operational, co-designed, and provided in a format that is prescribed by users;
2. they provide information at relevant temporal and spatial scales for Inuit use; and
3. they are adapted to locally dependent conditions and practices. IQ will be integrated in a science strategy for the collection of surface and airborne geophysical and remote sensing data for the development of sea ice information retrievals utilizing satellite imagery, and for informing the development of on-ice and drone-based sensors and best practices therein.

Science outcomes will feed into an Inuit-led, IQ-grounded, Sikumik Qaujimajjuti (“tools to know how the ice is”) system for community ice information sharing, including Inuit produced ice travel safety maps in digital and hard-copy formats, custom Inuit co-designed and operated sensors, and educational tools with training grounded in Inuit ways of knowing and learning, Pilimmaksaqniq Sikulirijimik (“training to be a worker who deals with ice”). The project design will enable the transfer of knowledge from pilot communities to across Inuit Nunangat, empowering communities to meet climate adaptation needs while supporting Inuit self-determination in ice monitoring and travel safety.

Since 2011, Tropical Atlantic countries have faced massive coastal accumulations of Sargassum seaweed, causing economic, ecological, and health-related problems. Sargassum influx is expected to continue with climate change, exacerbating its adverse effects and increasing the costs associated with its management (Over 200 million USD annually). While Sargassum seaweed can be processed into commercial products, the lack of community awareness and governmental support in rural areas challenges the development of new pathways to explore and identify potential economic uses of Sargassum. There is a need for more holistic Sargassum management frameworks that increase local community preparedness for algal blooms (knowledge of the time, location, and extent of algal outbreaks) and coordination for its clean-up.

Our project aims to create the first locally focused framework to increase community preparedness to manage massive Sargassum landings effectively. Implementing this framework and capacity-building workshops with our local partners in the Brazilian Amazon (Salinoplis, Para) and the Mexican Mesoamerican Reef (Mahahual, Quintana Roo) will increase community resilience to Sargassum landings while establishing novel blue economy opportunities that support community sustainable growth and further promote Sargassum clean-up. More specifically, our project aims to achieve the following:

• Create an accessible Sargassum tracking app to identify the extent, location, and time of Sargassum landings. This will be coupled with capacity-building workshops on aerial remote sensing for the constant update of the tool and to increase local capacities.
• Develop an air quality alarm system that informs local populations of the health impacts of Sargassum decomposition and supports local management that prioritizes health.
• Increase local accessibility to Sargassum valorization methodologies to support local blue economies and evaluate the best products to maximize community benefits and support female leadership.
• Integrate goals 1, 2 and 3 to create didactic products to ensure community uptake, including workshops, exhibitions, a video game, and a smartphone app containing the framework for managing Sargassum. These digital products have extended reach and have the potential to support other impacted communities across the Tropical Atlantic.

We will work with informal settlements residents in Sub-Saharan African cities to understand the lived realities of climate change and co-produce contextually appropriate adaptation strategies. Typically, informal settlement residents are excluded from formal planning processes. Historic marginalization and structural inequalities mean that these residents are disproportionately exposed to cascading climate hazards that compound their socio-economic vulnerability. Even within informal settlements, some are more vulnerable or excluded than others, such as women and girls, people living with disabilities, and other minorities. Our participatory, inclusive, interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral research focuses on risks to:

• human health (R1),
• living standards (R2),
• and critical physical infrastructure, networks, and services (R3),
• and it will necessarily involve other complex, intersecting risks to water and food security.

Identifying these interactions is vital for developing effective adaptations and to avoid further harm from urban policy which overlooks informality and may exacerbate injustices including distributive (the distribution of adaptation’s risks and benefits); procedural (inclusion-exclusion in decision-making); and recognitional (recognizing lived experiences and local knowledge).

Our multi-national, cross-disciplinary and multi-sectoral team will explore the cascading, multi-dimensional risks in urban informal settlements in three sub-Saharan African cities that experience differing climate-relates risks (Freetown, Kampala, and Bulawayo). Our specific objectives are to:

1. Adopt participatory methods that empower community members and other stakeholders to identify community vulnerabilities, exposures, and (lack of) adaptive capacity to the primary risks (R1-3), and secondary risks to water and food security, and their cascading impacts based on people's lived experiences.
2. Co-design adaptation strategies and interventions with diverse stakeholders that enhance just and equitable resilience, rather than perpetuate or exacerbate existing risks.
3. Engage with many informal and formal stakeholders and policymakers to pilot the implementation of the co-designed adaptation strategies which will also:
4. Strengthen connections and learning across research, countries, governance systems and communities and enable broad-based and integrated adaptation strategies for future policy implementation and knowledge mobilization.

Flooding poses risks to low-lying socio-ecological systems, living standards, health, water security, critical community infrastructure, and human mobility. Managed retreat (MR)—"the purposeful relocation of people, property, and critical infrastructure out of areas vulnerable to recurrent climatic hazards"—is a bold adaptation approach that offers both risk reduction and opportunities to advance social justice. Historically, MR has been applied in the post-disaster context (e.g., buyouts of damaged homes). This reactive, top-down process often results in inequitable outcomes. Despite prior limitations, MR is now emerging as a transformative adaptation solution to permanently reduce risks and build climate resilience, if strategically planned for. Recent floods have shown how dominant protective strategies often

1. fail to reduce underlying drivers of hazard exposure and vulnerability,
2. do not account for complexity, uncertainty, and changing habitability, and
3. limit options to integrate socio-cultural, ecological, and economic co-benefits.

Local authorities often lack the information, resources, and capacities to implement novel adaptations and depart from existing path dependencies. We will investigate if and how MR can be incorporated as a proactive strategy to reduce flood risks and support community well-being (e.g., socio-ecological resilience, sustainable livelihoods, climate justice). Addressing existing knowledge gaps, we will identify

1. the decision support needed to evaluate MR as a viable adaptation strategy, and
2. the program design elements necessary for equity-informed, community-engaged MR.

Integrating expertise from political science, geography, engineering, urban planning, and local and Indigenous knowledge, we will iteratively develop a decision support framework and tools to support local decision-making.

• We will analyze past MR initiatives to identify best practices, challenges, and complexities; conduct a comparative analysis of MR programs at various stages across Canada, the USA, and Indonesia;
• identify resident and decision-maker perspectives through community roundtables;
• and develop decision criteria and summary briefs using scenarios to show projected flood risks through downscaled climate modelling and geospatial mapping.

Eight case studies, all vulnerable to present and future floods, represent communities currently engaging in MR or seeking guidance on how MR could potentially factor into longer term adaptations.

Climate change and related perils pose direct threats to coastal communities and accelerate the accumulation of disaster impacts, thereby shortening times between successive hazardous events. Without pre-disaster recovery plans, communities will be trapped in a negative spiral of dwindling community capacity and resources and unable to cope with future disasters. Since community disaster resilience is a shared responsibility among citizens, municipalities, and governments, it is imperative for all stakeholders to co-develop disaster risk mitigation strategies and implement them in a cooperative approach.

The project aims to empower vulnerable global populations under climate-geological risks through community-participatory approaches for disaster resilience by focusing on coastal communities in Canada, Cuba, and Indonesia. There are significant differences in the community’s capability and available resources to cope with and adapt to future climate risks in these three countries. Within these communities, significant disparities and inequity regarding financial and human resources exist. The project integrates quantitative risk assessments of compounding climate-geological multi-hazards and physically interconnected infrastructures (community resilience stress-testing) and qualitative socioeconomic systems to identify the most vulnerable people in individual communities while recognizing the differences in cultural and social backgrounds.

The project team comprises

1. climate change and geological hazard scientists who will focus on the adaptive multi-hazard framework;
2. infrastructure and systems specialists who will characterize and assess the physical and socioeconomic impacts of interrupted infrastructure and services; and
3. social scientists who will work with local communities to develop risk mitigation and preparedness-recovery plans.

In the target communities in Canada, Cuba, and Indonesia, non-Indigenous and Indigenous people live with different socioeconomic conditions and cultural-value systems. Through the participatory community-driven disaster resilience approaches, the team will identify the key requirements of these different populations and co-produce tailored strategies for enhanced disaster risk reduction, which are enabled by innovative decision-support tools that can consider the complexity of compounding multi-hazard risks. Knowledge mobilization will facilitate the cross-pollination of Global North and South countries.

The Resilient Remittances (R2) Project responds to international calls to enhance adaptive capacities and resilience-building strategies to address the risks of climate change to food security, rural and urban livelihoods, and human mobility in Africa. The IPCC recognizes mobility as an effective climate adaptation measure to climate impacts. The UN recommends systematic integration of a migration lens in planning, implementing, and funding adaptation. Climate-related transformations include intensified mobility, disrupted rural-urban links and remittance flows, and food insecurity, Remittances thus constitute significant resources for climate adaptation. R2 project positions remittances, rural-urban links, food security, and (im)mobility as intersecting components of an applied research program in eight African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and South Africa) and three other countries (Qatar, Canada and the UK).

R2 addresses four key risks from the Sixth Assessment IPCC (3, 4, 6, 8) and the priorities of the Africa Climate Mobility Initiative (ACMI) and Climate Mobility Africa Research Network (CMARN). R2 objectives include:

1. co-producing and mobilizing knowledge about the role of migration and remittances in rural and urban resilience to climate change;
2. identifying adaptation strategies for enhancing remittance infrastructure resilience and leveraging remittances for reduced food insecurity among migrants and sending communities and
3. building capacity of research partners, local communities, migrant groups, and agencies in mobilizing remittances for climate adaptation. R2 has four Workstreams:
   • WS1: Remittance Pathways;
   • WS2: Remittance Practices;
   • WS3: Remittance Potentials; and
   • WS4: Remittance Platforms.

Working with migrant associations and local communities in rural and urban study sites in partner countries, R2 has a mixed methods program including mapping climate change vulnerabilities to food insecurity; household surveys; focus groups; photovoice study; in-depth qualitative interview; participant-observation in migration corridors; and key informant interviews with community leaders, government, and remittance operators.

Climate change and mobility have generated various research and policy responses, but the significance and novelty of R2 lies in its promotion of the potential of remittance flows of cash and food for climate adaptation and mitigation of food insecurity.

Arctic communities depend on safe, accessible, and affordable transportation routes to underpin sustainable livelihoods, culture, and food security. Climate change is contributing to increasingly unpredictable conditions across the cryosphere (i.e. sea ice, freshwater ice, snow, and permafrost). These changes in the cryosphere are making the Arctic more accessible, but also creating a riskier environment with more hazardous transportation routes. Concurrently, these cryospheric changes are also altering migration patterns of traditional food sources, including caribou, beluga, narwhals, and whitefish. This in turn impacts routes used for hunting and herding, thereby creating challenges for Indigenous food security, culture, and mental health across the circumpolar Arctic. Our research will provide climate forecasting and community engagement around the cryosphere in five key risk areas:

1. terrestrial and ocean ecosystems;
2. critical physical infrastructure;
3. food security;
4. water security, and
5. human health.

We will work in concert with Indigenous communities who rely on the cryosphere for critical transportation infrastructure, food security, and water security in Canada (Inuvik, Northwest Territories and Pond Inlet, Nunavut), the United States (Circle, Utqiaġvik), and Norway (Troms & Finnmark, Nordland & Trøndelag). We will develop and operationalize a dashboard of real-time forecasting and climate projections for ice and snow conditions at local community scales, based on an adaptive system using models, remote sensing, in situ measurements, and traditional community knowledge, thereby addressing limitations of current climate models. Our approach will transfer successful monitoring and adaptation solutions from one nation to communities in the others.

We aim to co-create workshops and scholarships to train the next generations of Indigenous scientists in cutting-edge modelling and geomatics techniques. We will also engage with Indigenous artists to create documentaries and children’s books based on our research findings to help educate the next generation on why the cryosphere is changing and what this may mean for our livelihoods. Ultimately, our goal is to create a comprehensive prediction system that synthesizes the effects of cryospheric changes on Arctic transportation infrastructure and its cascading influence on health and food security, to provide reliable and safe solutions for northern communities.

Climate change accelerates biodiversity decline and biodiversity loss intensifies climate breakdown. Current national commitments under the Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework do not live up to these challenges. Nature-based Climate Action (NBCA) understood as multi-actor, cross-sectoral collaborative commitments that integrate nature and biodiversity considerations within climate mitigation and adaptation strategies have the potential to complement national commitments, while responding to climate change-induced risks to

1. terrestrial and ocean ecosystems,
2. living standards, and
3. human health.

The overall objective of the BioCAM4 consortium project is to develop methodologies for mapping NBCA trends worldwide and assessing local opportunities and challenges through deep-dive studies in two biodiversity hot-spot world regions: East Africa and Central America, where vulnerable groups and communities are among the most affected by climate impacts, least responsible for it, and have reduced adaptive capacity due to social and economic fragility. Overall, the interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral BioCAM4 consortium project pursues three specific objectives:

1. A comprehensive global mapping and analysis of NBCAs and an open-access database to offer insights on global NBCA distribution, patterns, and performance. Understanding of global trends will inform global climate change and biodiversity processes.
2. Context-specific and locally relevant exploration of local dynamics of NBCAs in four localities across two regions that are highly biodiverse: Virunga and Lake Victoria regions in East Africa, and Trifinio and Brunca regions in Central America. We uncover how biophysical, cultural and institutional factors affect community action for implementing NBCAs, understand action situations and actor interactions therein, and their outputs, outcomes, and impacts to inform performance assessments at global level and provide evidence-based, justice-driven insights for multi-level policy guidance.
3. Co-creation of knowledge mobilization and policy outreach to translate research insights into policy guidance for equitable funding flows and resources that strengthen the capacity of local actors to design, implement and maintain effective and inclusive NBCAs in the project's focus areas and worldwide.

Research co-creation and policy outreach at global and local levels will strengthen capacity for NBCAs.

This project addresses risks to 1) low-lying coastal socio-ecological systems and 8) peace and human mobility. The objectives are to

1. map connections between climate change adaptation (CCA), dispossession and displacement and
2. identify pathways to more inclusive CCA.

CCA reforestation programs to conserve biodiversity and protect vulnerable communities from extreme weather are implemented in coastal parts of Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ghana that are exposed to climate risks. However, coastal fisher communities depend on access to waters and adjacent land. Affected groups’ access to adjacent land conflicts with CCA reforestation programs, potentially dispossessing the most vulnerable of their livelihoods, putting them at greater risks of displacement and reinforcing their vulnerabilities to climate impacts. One especially vulnerable group is landless women (Levien 2017). Yet, linkages between climate change adaptation, dispossession, displacement and its gendered dimensions are under-researched. Hence, we ask: How do CCA programs contribute to gendered processes of dispossession?

The challenges posed by CCA programs show how climate and societal change occur simultaneously and must be tackled together. Drawing on theories on dispossession, displacement and climate change adaptation, we will bring out novel connections between these different fields. Because tensions between biodiversity and access to land and waters for vulnerable communities contribute to dispossession, we will use a nature-based solutions framework that “works with and enhances nature to address societal challenges” (Seddon et al 2019) as a lens to look for synergies. To analyze the gendered dimensions of dispossession and highlight contextual and social vulnerabilities, we use an intersectional approach, highlighting the co-constitution of inequalities (Lykke 2006).

Mapping of existing CCA initiatives will be conducted. A meta-analysis of these sites will identify patterns, allow comparisons, and identify high-risk sites for ethnographic fieldwork. We will use participatory methods to co-construct inclusive solutions with vulnerable groups.

Our approaches develop three solution pathways

• Novel interdisciplinary theories of CCA.
• A mapping of CCA programs to identify risks of dispossession and guidelines for best practices.
• Creation of a South-South coastal community network, using a low-tech platform, to share knowledge and create a coastal toolkit.