Programme Description
The Nature, People and Climate (NPC) Programme, at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), aims to tackle the multiple drivers and impacts of climate change, resulting from human activities on land resources and ecosystems services, in an integrated manner. It specifically targets research activities, evidence generation, policy advocacy, and practical innovations that recognize the interdependence among nature, climate-change responses, and the improvement of the sources of livelihoods of local communities.
Rationale
Nature plays a crucial role in adapting and mitigating to climate change impacts. Ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, and oceans act as carbon sinks, absorbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and helping to regulate the global climate. Evidence clearly indicates that nature has long been subject to multiple stressors including habitat degradation, urbanization, pollution, and over-exploitation, underscored by the adoption of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD) in 1992. Climate change acts as both an additional stressor and an exacerbator of the pre-existing stressors of nature. The Paris Climate Agreement commits to keep global warming below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. Above the 1.5 °C limit, the risks of extreme weather and collapsing natural assets and ecosystems grow.
Objectives
The program is designed to adopt a holistic, multisectoral, people centric and systems-level approach, enabling all concerned stakeholders to participate. The specific objectives are
Activity Stream
The focus is to strengthen the resilience of natural systems which includes the nexus of agriculture, forestry and water resources that sustain goods and services, leading to prosperity in the face of climate change. Some of the specific approaches employed include application of Locally Led Adaptation (LLA), ecosystem based adaptation, landscape level biodiversity conservation and management, and understanding nature-based solutions better and building capacity. Cross-cutting areas include knowledge and evidence generation, policy and institutional governance, financing, gender, and social Inclusion. Further work is targeted at addressing loss and damage, studying and anticipating transformational adaptation within the realm of natural systems and access to climate financing.
Our work at glance
