Collaborative Research: Climate Forecasting, Adaptation Backcasting: Coupling Human Response to Climate Change in Malawi

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This project will address three acute research needs identified by the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: understanding the relationship between climatic variability and human adaptation; examining the "more detailed local-level analyses of the role of multiple interacting factors, including development activities and climate risk-reduction in the African context"; and regional studies "focusing on future options and pathways for adaptation." The research objective is to better understand adaptation to climate change as a coupled human/biophysical process, taking seriously both qualitative understandings of local livelihoods and adaptation informed by cutting-edge social theory. This project's research methods will include the development of regional climate models for southern Africa. Once these climate models have been tested and verified, the research team will then compile a database of meteorological and economic data so that the PIs can match their climate scenarios with years in the past that have a similar weather profile (drought, floods, etc). The results from these modeling efforts will then be presented to local farming communities to gauge changes that they might undertake given the climate scenarios and the ways in which they have previously adapted to climatic and economic variability. The outcome of these iterative, mixed methods will be an understanding of adaptation and its biophysical impacts will provide greatly refined data to inform regional and sub-regional scenario and modeling efforts integral to future adaptation and development planning.This project represents a novel approach to studying a complex scientific problem: the impacts of climate change on vulnerable human populations. Where many see quantitative efforts to understand and model climate change and its biophysical impacts and qualitative studies of livelihoods change and adaptation to these impacts as incommensurable, the proposed research will link social-theoretically informed, qualitatively-based research on livelihoods and adaptation to modeled biophysical processes via quantifiable measures of adaptation allowing for both attention to local particularity and the generalization of research findings to inform broader scientific understandings and policy development. With respect to broader societal impacts, the investigators expect this project to contribute to three main areas, namely, the strengthening of National Adaptation Programme of Action in the three countries, the offering of short courses at the partnering African universities, and the hands on training of U.S. and African Ph.D. students through close contact during field research trips. This project is jointly supported by the NSF Geography and Spatial Sciences Program and the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering.