How can we respond to adaptation barriers?
The Pacific Islands are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts such as sea level rise, storm surges, flooding, and erosion, which negatively affect communities’ food and water supplies, livelihoods, and culture. Here, there is an urgent need to enhance climate change adaptation efforts. Yet adaptation knowledge gaps, whether it is the absence of knowledge or lack of access to existing knowledge, have been shown to pose a significant barrier to successful adaptation actions.
The Lima Adaptation Knowledge Initiative (LAKI) addresses these issues at sub-regional levels by identifying and prioritizing adaptation knowledge gaps and by catalyzing action to bridge these gaps. On February 23-26, as part of the first phase of LAKI, a group of climate change experts from across the Pacific Islands gathered for the very first Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) LAKI Workshop.
"We in the Pacific are in a fight for our lives to adapt,” says Dr. Christopher Bartlett, an independent climate expert from the Republic of Vanuatu, who joined the LAKI workshop. “The LAKI approach is helping us identify the highest priority gaps in adaptation knowledge so that we can continue to act swiftly, ambitiously and effectively to avoid and minimize the worst impacts."
Creating a community of practice to scale up action
During the workshop, climate change experts discussed, categorized, and prioritized adaptation knowledge gaps and mapped the actions required to close these gaps. This participatory multi-stakeholder approach catalyzes demand-driven collaborations to scale up action in response to the impacts of climate change.
The priority knowledge gaps span multiple sectors, and they include a lack of knowledge on how to include women, girls, and people with disabilities in designing and implementing adaptation plans and policies. Another priority knowledge gap is the lack of knowledge for climate change officers, finance officers, and relevant sector officers to access climate change adaptation funds. See the full list of priority knowledge gaps here.
“LAKI for me is important as it stimulates collaboration and partnership to work together in closing the identified adaptation gaps to build resilience of Pacific people and countries to the adverse impacts of climate change”, says Ms. Malia Talakai, Climate Change Adviser at Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) at Samoa.
The first phase of LAKI focuses on understanding the critical knowledge gaps through a priority-setting workshop. So far, these workshops have been conducted in six subregions: Andean, West Asia/Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), North Africa, Southern Africa, Indian Ocean Islands and Hindu-Kush-Himalayan. A total of 85 knowledge gaps for targeted knowledge users have been identified across the subregions during the workshops.
The second phase of the LAKI, which the GCC and North Africa subregions are now undertaking, builds on LAKI’s first phase, where 12 organisations have come together to identify and develop joint activities that will actively close the priority adaptation knowledge gaps. The first expert meeting was held in December 8-10, 2020 and the second and third are planned for March and April 2021.
The outcomes of the LAKI Pacific SIDS priority-setting workshop will be presented at the upcoming 7th APAN Forum on 8-12, March 2021. Join us for the session by registering here.
The workshop was jointly organized by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) through GAN’s regional network the Asia-Pacific Adaptation Network (APAN), the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), and the UN Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat.
For more information about the LAKI Pacific SIDS workshop, please click here.
About the Lima Adaptation Knowledge Initiative (LAKI)
LAKI is a joint action pledge under the Nairobi Work Programme (NWP) between the UNFCCC Secretariat and UNEP through Global Adaptation Network (GAN) and its regional networks to address knowledge barriers hindering the implementation and scaling up of adaptation action. To learn more about the LAKI, click here.
To get involved, please contact: nwp@unfccc.int
