DIIS joins Kenyan and Danish partners in the Rights and Resilience project
While the UN climate negotiations get underway in Poland, a new collaborative research effort has kicked off. The Rights and Resilience project – also known as RARE – will investigate the little studied connections between climate change adaptation and land rights.
Across Africa, Asia and Latin America people at the frontlines of climate change are trying to adapt to new environmental realities. Dealing with droughts, floods and other impacts of climate change is hard enough in itself, but for many farmers and pastoralists across the Global South there’s an extra challenge: The impacts of climate change are happening at a time when key resources such as land and water are subject to growing competition and conflict as a result of land investments, resource extraction, urban growth and other economic change.
What does that mean for people’s ability to adapt to climate change, and what kinds of land rights can support their adaptation? By examining these issues, the project will address a key aspect of climate resilience that remains poorly understood.
The project will especially focus on pastoralist adaptation in Kenya’s drylands, using this as a case study for broader national and global learning. The researchers will investigate what climate change adaption means for people’s land needs, how land conflicts affect people’s ability to adapt, and what global, national and local institutions can do to secure people’s land access for adaptation.
The project is a multi-partner effort between the University of Nairobi, the University of Copenhagen, Roskilde University, DIIS, the International Livestock Research Institute and the Scidev.net media platform. It engages with Kenyan policy makers and civil society, and brings together three institutes at the University of Nairobi - namely the Institute for Development Studies, the Department of Geography and Environment Studies, and the Institute for Climate Change Adaptation.
The project is funded by a grant from the Danish Consultative Research Committee (FFU) as part of the development research funding provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark.
The project is coordinated by the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. Click here for information and contacts.