Name Jake Wilson
Programme / year PhD /third year
Project title: Connecting Climate Justice and Climate Change Adaptation: The Case of Food
Security
Background to the Project:
The most recent Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC, 2014) raised the spectre of the problems faced by the world’s poorest, most foodinsecure people being compounded as never before by the impacts of climate change. The
fifth Assessment Report presents a far more accurate picture than its predecessor of the
impacts of climate change now and in the future upon agriculture and food security. Climate
impacts are unevenly distributed: tropical regions with a high proportion of the world’s
food-insecure people are likely to bear the brunt of reduced yields (Vermuelen et al., 2014).
The thesis considers a relatively recent framework for conceptualising climate change which
can be called the climate justice approach, focussed on the fact that the most vulnerable
people in the world to climate change are also least responsible for climate impacts and
least in a position to do anything about them.
There is a moral responsibility to act both to mitigate the drivers and to adapt to the
consequences of climate change (Jamison, 2010; Schinkel, 2011). Adaptation with
reference to systems bearing upon food security was chosen as a focus since the largest
amount of adaptation projects in the world’s poorest countries relate to food security and
associated sectors. This does not necessarily limit the scope of inquiry to agricultural
activity, since the determinants of vulnerability to food insecurity extend into economic and
sociocultural contexts, as well as being themselves located within specific ecological systems
and agro-ecological systems.
What is the Project researching?
The overall aim of the thesis is to apply a climate justice lens to adaptation to climate
change in sub-Saharan countries with relevance to food security and water resource
management, to determine the utility of such an approach for enhancing sustainable
development and increasing resilience.
In addition to scrutiny of climate change literature relating to adaptation, food security and
climate justice, an in-depth examination of National Adaptation Plans of Action for subSaharan Africa was undertaken to produce a typology of adaptation responses in relation to
water and food security.
The second phase of research takes Malawi as a case study example of an approach to
adaptation which often seeks to incorporate conceptions of fairness and equity within it.
Part of the research seeks to determine how first-round Climate Justice Fund projects in
Malawi have made communities more resilient to and aware of climate impacts, and
improved their quality of life.
What are the findings so far?
The first stage of work examined the premise that there is a broad correlation between
levels of fairness and equity evident in the National Programmes of Action of 21 LeastDeveloped countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the prospects for success of priority actions
proposed to address adaptation to climate impacts and food security.
Malawi was identified from the analysis of the NAPAs and the typology of adaptation
responses as a country with a high level of equity and fairness embedded within its
proposed adaptation programme. Elements considered within the analysis, and its
triangulation through interviews with stakeholders, included food security, equity/ equality,
mitigation and adaptation, funding, and sustainable agriculture.
Adaptation strategies which focus upon increasing adaptive capacity while building in equity
of access, and as a function of distributive justice, carry a greater likelihood of achieving
climate justice for the most vulnerable populations.
References
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2014) Climate Change 2014: Impacts,
Adaptation, and Vulnerability, IPCC: Geneva.
Jamison, A. (2010). ‘Climate Change Knowledge and Social Movement Theory’, Wiley
Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(6), pp.811–823.
Schinkel, A. (2011) ‘Causal and Moral Responsibility of Individuals for (the Harmful
Consequences of) Climate Change’, Ethics, Policy & Environment, 14(1), pp.35–37.
Vermuelen, S. et al. (2014) Info Note: Climate Change, food security and small-scale
producers, CGIAR: Montpelier.