AIACC Global Kick-off Meeting Summary

Sixty investigators from 20 Regional Studies that are being funded under AIACC were brought together with other invited participants for a global kick-off meeting at UNEP Headquarters in Nairobi. The meeting marks the start of a three-year effort during which participating scientists will investigate vulnerabilities to climate change and climate variability within their regions, evaluate adaptation options, and engage with private and public sector decision makers to integrate scientific information into adaptation decisions.

The objectives of the meeting were to (i) encourage and facilitate reevaluation and refinement of regional study designs, (ii) develop plans for technical support and training, (iii) identify opportunities for cross-study collaborations, (iv) discuss possible AIACC products for summarizing and synthesizing methods and results of AIACC Regional Studies, and (v) sort out administrative issues related to implementing the studies.

The stage was set on the first day by four keynote talks on new directions in climate change assessment. Ian Burton, Michael Hulme, Richard Warrick and Tom Downing made presentations on, respectively, frameworks for assessing adaptation, development and application of climate and socioeconomic scenarios, integrating science and stakeholders in the assessment process, and vulnerability assessment frameworks and measures of vulnerability. Patrick Mushove, Patricia Romero, Yongyuan Yin, and Rodel Lasco added their comments on these topics and challenged the meeting participants to explore and advance innovative methods of assessment (see AIACC, Contributing to a second-generation of climate change assessments). Later in the week, additional presentations on advances in assessment methods were made by Mac Callaway, Max Campos, Bill Dougherty, Andrew Githeko, Saleemul Huq, Roger Jones, Kate Lonsdale, Xianfu Lu, Graciela Magrin, Anand Patwardhan, Bob Scholes, Cynthia Rosenzweig, and Mike Rutherford.

The presentations, and the discussions that followed, raised a number of issues that were revisited throughout the five-day meeting. Vulnerabilities related to climate change are considered to be significant for developing countries, and yet climate change adaptation continues to be given low priority by many decision makers. Some of the factors contributing to this include (i) the prevalence of other stresses that pose immediate obstacles to development and threats to livelihoods and survival in developing countries, (ii) the perception that the stresses from climate change will be felt largely in the relatively distant future, and (iii) the cascade of scientific uncertainties that hamper attempts to predict the consequences of different actions at spatial scales that are relevant to adaptation decisions. Action on adaptation is also stalled by failures to generate and communicate information about vulnerabilities and adaptation options in forms that have ready application by, and credibility with, those who would adapt.

Meeting participants struggled with the implications of these and other issues for the design of regional climate change assessments that would produce information useful for adaptation decisions. Some common themes that were voiced include the importance of engaging stakeholders in the assessment process, the need to evaluate climate change and climate change adaptation in the context of other stresses, the prospects for "mainstreaming" adaptation into sustainable development planning, the advantages of focusing on broad strategies of adaptation that enhance communities’ capacity to cope with climate variability and extremes, and the benefits of evaluating near term vulnerabilities and adaptation options. For many of the study teams, the meeting in Nairobi was only the beginning of a process to refine their study objectives, methods, models and scenarios that will continue at upcoming AIACC workshops. Ultimately, each regional study will craft and implement its own approach.

During the meeting, input was sought for planning AIACC training and technical support activities. A number of ideas emerged from these discussions:

• Facilitate sharing of expertise across regional study teams so that teams may support and learn from each other;
• Make use of the experiences and expertise of regional study team members in training workshops;
• Supplement planned project mentoring (which largely would be via email and telephone) with on-site visits;
• Develop an interactive web resource that will allow participants to share methods, data, scenarios, working papers and other information related to their studies;
• Create (or link to) a database of models for assessment of climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

An immediate response to the input was to invite the principal investigator of several of the regional studies to present a case study at the June workshop on methods for assessment of vulnerability and adaptation. The case studies will be incorporated into the workshop curriculum and used to exemplify assessment approaches. The AIACC office is presently exploring options to implement other suggestions made at the Nairobi meeting for training and technical support.

Regional breakout sessions for project teams from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean provided opportunities to explore possible cross-study collaborations within each of the regions. Many of the study teams have begun planning joint activities, some of which are briefly described in the reports from the regional sessions.

With this very stimulating meeting, the AIACC regional studies are launched and we look forward with high expectations for good science that is relevant to important problems and decisions. The meeting agenda, with links to several of the presentations, is posted on the AIACC webpage.