As the premier global conference on adaptation to climate change, Adaptation Futures brings over 1,000 scientists, practitioners, business leaders and policymakers together to discuss the world’s most pressing resilience issues and identify promising solutions. This year’s event will be the first held on the African continent in Cape Town, and it will have a strong focus on the Global South and the adaptation challenges that developing countries face.

Join the conversation: #AF2018

WRI staff will host or participate in the following events.

Improving Data Access for Climate Preparedness Through Public-Private Partnerships

When: June 20, 2018 from 08:00 – 09:00 SAST

Where: Room 2.45

Description: Adaptation decision-makers and practitioners are grappling with tough questions in a changing climate. PREPdata, an initiative of the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness, can help. An open-source, map-based platform, PREPdata provides easy, intuitive access to the information needed to analyze vulnerability and build resilience to climate change. It allows users around the world to explore highly credible climate, physical and socioeconomic datasets curated from sources like NASA, the European Space Agency and more; map them to visualize a specific region’s vulnerability; track the indicators most relevant to their work on customizable dashboards; request additions of new datasets or tools to PREPdata; and share their stories with adaptation professionals around the world.

In both India and across Africa, the Partnership is working with governments and civil society organizations to equip countries hardest hit by climate change with the tailor-made data visualizations and dashboards that they need to build resilience.

At the event, speakers will demo the platform, explaining how to discover and visualize datasets, overlay indicators to do visual analysis and share customized dashboards developed in recent applications in India. They will also share lessons learned from their work in India and across Africa.

WRI Speakers: Lauretta Burke, Senior Associate, Climate Resilience


What would transformative adaptation in agriculture look like, really?

When: June 20, 2018 from 14:15 – 16:00 SAST

Where: Room 1.41

Description: Intensifying climate change impacts threaten our ability to feed the world’s swelling population. Saltwater inundation is drowning farms in Bangladesh, extreme droughts are killing livestock in Ethiopia, wildfires have charred orchards and vineyards in California and erratic rainfall coupled with rising temperatures is forcing rural migration across Pakistan.

Global agricultural yields will begin declining as soon as 2030, and these projections include scenarios that account for current adaptation efforts, suggesting that current resilience strategies won’t be enough to safeguard crop yields. In some communities, we will have to move beyond incremental climate proofing and adopt a more transformative approach. Many governments, international adaptation funders and private sector leaders have started to recognize the need for such fundamental systemic shifts in agricultural development, but consensus and a framework for achieving transformative goals has yet to be established.

Join adaptation finance, agriculture and transformation experts for a discussion on what it will take to adapt agricultural systems to intensifying climate impacts around the globe. Speakers will showcase examples of transformation, explore pathways towards systemic change and discuss the boundaries, limitations and solutions to transformative adaptation in agriculture and climate-resilient food systems.

WRI Speakers: Rebecca Carter, Deputy Director, Climate Resilience Practice


Scaling Up Country-Owned Adaptation Measures: Early Lessons from the Adaptation Fund and Green Climate Fund

When: June 20, 2018 from 16:30 – 18:15 SAST

Where: Room 1.62

Description: Adaptation finance remains in short supply relative to anticipated needs. Developing countries will require upwards of $500 billion per year to adapt to a changing climate, but funding for building resilience in these regions had reached just $22.5 billion by 2014. Whatever adaptation finance that is available must be used to achieve the greatest impacts.

Co-hosted by the Adaptation Fund and the Green Climate Fund Secretariats, this session will focus on scaling up transformative, country-wide resilience through existing multilateral funds in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Country representatives will share insights on using climate funds to catalyze private sector investment in adaptation, piloting and scaling successful resilience strategies, and leveraging available finance to protect vulnerable communities across their countries.

WRI Speakers: Christina Chan, Director, Climate Resilience Practice


Success Stories of Ecosystem Based Adaptation: Experiences from Ecuador, Colombia, Central America and Brazil

When: June 21, 2018 from 09:15 – 11:00 SAST

Where: Room 1.44

Description: Ecosystem-based adaptation – sustainable management and restoration of natural ecosystems – has enormous potential to reduce vulnerability to climate impacts and improve communities’ resilience to a changing climate. Yet it remains an undervalued, often overlooked strategy.

Join speakers from across Latin America as they profile ecosystem-based adaptation success stories. WRI Brasil’s Katerina Elias-Trostmann will focus on the current policy set-up and case studies from Brazil. An agricultural superpower rich in biodiversity, the country must adopt sustainable land management approaches that will leverage natural infrastructure to adapt to climate impacts and reduce ecosystem degradation without slowing agricultural development. Katerina will share preliminary findings from a WRI Brasil-GIZ study that evaluates the adaptation potential of current forest and landscape restoration and low-carbon policies for the Brazilian agricultural sector.

WRI Speakers: Katerina Elias-Trostmann, Senior Research Analyst, Climate Resilience, WRI Brasil

Event Contact: Felipe Gomez Villota, GIZ Colombia


Green Climate Fund’s Approach and Scope for Providing Support to Adaptation Activities

When: June 21, 2018 from 09:15 – 11:00 SAST

Where: Room 1.62

Description: Driving a paradigm shift towards climate-resilient development, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) will share its approach for supporting adaptation – one informed by an analysis of international climate finance, a WRI study of the GCF’s portfolio and pipeline, identified priorities for GCF investments and discussions with private and public sector stakeholders. Christina Chan will present findings from the WRI study that the GCF commissioned, and country representatives will share their experiences adapting to the impacts of climate change, including with support from the GCF.

WRI Speakers: Christina Chan, Director, Climate Resilience Practice

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