Category: Innovation

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Climate-smart Agriculture Gender Innovation Regional

A Story of Resilience: Women and Climate-Smart Agriculture

Photo by Sana Zulfiqar

We are getting homegrown vegetables and getting an additional income too. I never thought before to earn and save 3500 rupees every month! 

– Rubina

A beneficiary of the Lodhran Pilot Project (LPP), Rubina was selected by the Village Disaster Management Committee to receive training on climate-smart agriculture tools and techniques under its Building Disaster Resilience in Pakistan project.

Women experience a low income and constantly struggle to make ends meet in Jhang, a district in Pakistan’s Punjab province. After the LPP’s intervention, Rubina can now see a future full of possibilities!

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is a component of the LPP’s project, which was a much-needed intervention for the rural community in Jhang district. The initiative was implemented from December 2018 to October 2020.

The CSA component sought to enable local farmers to learn and embrace climate-smart techniques to improve community disaster preparedness in seven of the most flood-prone union councils. The project enhanced farmers’ economic empowerment and helped communities benefit from higher agricultural yields in the long run.

According to the Global Climate Risk Index, Pakistan is among the top 10 most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Punjab province, in particular, faces the dichotomy of severe droughts and extreme floods. These extremities undermine farm yields which eventually threaten household food security in the province.

Women generally own less livestock than their male counterparts and also contract for less pay. These differential constraints and insufficiency of resources can make women more vulnerable to climate shocks than men. 

Therefore, empowering women such as Rubina with climate-smart tools to help women pilot CSA strategies is an important initiative.

Sakina Mai, another beneficiary of the LPP’s project from Dossa colony, recalls that sessions were held for women, who showed keen interest in kitchen gardening. She says that the LPP not only distributed seed packets and a tool kit for practical work, but also guided beneficiaries through the process at every step.

They held fortnightly sessions for all farmers where Sakina was a regular attendee. Soon after implementing the new techniques that she had learned; she noticed an increase in her vegetable yields. She decided to sell this extra produce to support her family.

This extra income was a blessing during lockdown after the COVID-19 pandemic when my husband was unable to find any work.

– Sakina

Women like Rubina and Sakina belong to some of the most marginalized families in the region. Living in poverty, foreseen disasters like floods greatly affect their livelihoods each year, while unprecedented disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic only increased their hardships. 

Initiatives like Building Disaster Resilience in Pakistan project by the LPP targeted these communities to lift them out of poverty and give them the confidence needed to help contribute to their families’ incomes.

The LPP has benefited 1,284 people, out of which 538 are female, 50 elderly and 8 disabled. The project has not only helped in building disaster resilience and emergency preparedness, but also left the villages with a solid foundation to build on their agricultural techniques.

These techniques allow both women and men to actively lend their capacities to food and income security.

I have learnt that fostering economic independence is essential to empowering women. Not only women feel recognised but also independent within a household.

– Sakina

I share my learning with other women of my village and motivate them to adopt CSA techniques and kitchen gardening. I am glad this earning is fulfilling basic needs of my family.

– Rubina

As demonstrated by the examples of Sakina and Rubina, climate-smart agriculture can be the future of gearing towards climate resilience for women farmers.

LPP is a non-profit organization that implements different projects and programs in seven districts of Pakistan. The Climate-Smart Agriculture intervention was an important component of its project Building Disaster Resilience in Pakistan supported by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) of the Government of UK (formerly known as DFID) through Concern Worldwide.

The writer is Project Coordinator at ADPC in Pakistan

Email: sana.zulfiqar@adpc.net

Categories
Innovation Regional Resilient Infrastructure, Road

Transport in Bangladesh: Building Better Roads

Arlo Magicman/Shutterstock.com

Bangladesh has undergone significant economic growth in the last couple of years. Rural infrastructure development has played a major role in ensuring economic mobility and development.

Rural roads are the lifelines that help rural people get connected and move their merchandise and agricultural products all throughout the country.

Road infrastructure is balancing the growth of the national economy and rural economic development.

Unplanned road infrastructure can cause either flooding or erosion, ultimately leading to waterlogging and sedimentation. Also, non- resilient infrastructure is more likely to be washed away by floods and other climate-induced hazards. 

This means that ensuring climate resilience in this sector is imperative to allow other sectors to rebound after disasters and extreme climate-related events. 

However, the existing road design standards in the country lack climate resilience, especially in areas prone to flooding and storm surges that may cause erosion and damage to roads.

Cyclone/storms are the leading disaster types in Bangladesh, claiming 60% of total death counts around the world, and flooding is the second most damaging disaster, totaling almost 75% of natural hazard-related disasters affecting Bangladesh.

Currently, only 36% of 3.5 million kilometres of roads in the country are paved. Rural roads are under the jurisdiction of the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED), which is under the direct authority of the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives.

The need to develop an adaptation and resilience approach for transport infrastructure projects in every phase, especially for rural roads and rail lines, is well-recognized. 

Different types of climate change impacts will require different types of adaptation measures. The adaptation options for existing infrastructure, including identifying vulnerable locations using vulnerability assessment results, are recognized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

For example, extreme precipitation causes flash floods or riverine floods. Some of the critical recommendations for controlling the potential effects of these floods are: establishing flood modeling studies supplemented by improved design; improving construction standards using climate-resilient materials; and maintaining surface drainage. 

Capacity-building activities like the improvisation of policies and regulations with disaster preparedness training are also defined as resilience-building measures.

The Government of Bangladesh emphasizes the development and maintenance of rural roads with climate resilient designs by 2025. Bangladesh aspires to achieve 100% readiness for disasters by year 2041, using the strategic guidelines provided by Bangladesh’s 8th Five-Year Plan (July 2020-June 2025).

Published in 2020, this is the first plan supporting the Perspective Plan 2021-2041 (PP2041) and providing strategic guidelines to develop climate-, disaster- and impact-resilient rural transportation networks. 

In simple terms, it emphasizes the prioritization of roads to accelerate economic growth.

This Five-Year Plan addresses strategies and specific objectives and targets for rural road development, operation, maintenance, and strategic priorities for rural road networks in Bangladesh. 

A total of 16,000 km of two-lane rural roads are targeted to be constructed with resilient climate designs by 2025, as per the 8th Five-Year Plan. In addition, Bangladesh’s PP-2041 supports the development of climate-resilient infrastructure towards achieving 100% readiness for disasters by the year 2041.

The Government of Bangladesh’s commitment to eradicate poverty and strengthen rural roads will not only enhance connectivity and accessibility of remote areas in Bangladesh, but also create an opportunity for people living in rural Bangladesh to have dependable and climate resilient infrastructure during disasters and post-disaster periods. 

The future of Bangladesh’s economy depends on building better roads to create climate resilient transport sectors all over the country.

 

The writer is Resilient Transport Specialist at ADPC.

Email: naureen.laila@adpc.net

Categories
Innovation Regional

From Innovation to Impact: scaling-up the use of emerging technology to address climate and disaster resilience needs in South Asia

Photo by Andrii Yalanskyi/Shutterstock.com

Climate change is a major driver of disaster losses and failed development. Climate-related disasters, including extreme weather events, have dominated the global disaster landscape in the 21st century, which has led to shaping new approaches to science and practice in climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and resilience building.

Over the years, science has become more accessible, acknowledging that it also needs to deal with uncertainty. Policymakers are becoming more familiar with science as more and more public policy issues call for science-based solutions. Therefore, interactions between policymakers and science are increasingly complex and nonlinear, as opposed to early conceptions.

In South Asia, the decision-making spaces are shared by science and policymakers with the local community. The shared decision space is characterized by co-learning and knowledge production. The CARE for South Asia project empowers decision-makers with tools, products, and services to act locally on climate-sensitive issues such as disaster-related public policy and planning, agriculture, water, and transport.

Leveraging  advanced  technologies  and  prioritizing  a demand-driven approach to climate resilience, the CARE for South Asia project is offering a platform for using innovative approaches to help decision-makers respond better to a changing climate. The Climate Innovation Challenge (CIC) and the TechEmerge Resilience Challenge open up a new window of opportunities to mainstream technology for climate adaptation and disaster resilience for the benefit of all.

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, national disaster management offices (NDMOs), public finance and planning, supply chain drivers such as water and transportation, and public health authorities in South Asian countries are facing unprecedented challenges but are also presented with unparalleled opportunities in fighting an uphill battle against ever-increasing climate and extreme weather events.

This presents incredible opportunities to deploy emerging and future technologies to anticipate and mitigate the disaster and climate risk to protect the development gains and build the resilience of communities, assets, livelihoods, and systems. As technological development scales up, technologies for all aspects of disaster and climate resilience will also need to be adopted more widely.

Artificial Intelligence (AI),  the  Internet of  Things  (IoT), blockchain, robotics, and others are critical to accelerating this process, making disaster and climate resilience smarter, more efficient, affordable, and accurate—from multi-hazard detection and early warning to resilient connectivity solutions to climate-smart crop management, etc. To make these elements functional, trained people with the right skillsets as well as resources for the application of technologies are a must.

With technical and financial support of US$3.5 million from the World Bank and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development and implemented by ADPC under the umbrella of the CARE for South Asia project, we aim to support innovation in climate resilience building through the provision of grants to pilot-proven transformative, scalable, affordable, and accessible resilience technology solutions.

The writer is the Deputy Executive Director of ADPC.

Email: aslam@adpc.net