Bruce Currie-Alder International Development Research Center (Ottawa, Canada)

This experience demonstrates: •A ‘policy first’ approach to identify knowledge gaps and to craft research agendas on the demand of decision makers; •‘Research for impact’ that informs and assists communities, businesses, and governments (such as through integrated modeling to support Bangladesh’s delta plan 2100 or assessing value-chains in semi-arid lands to identify investment opportunities). •Opportunities for graduate students to understand research and implementation needs with respect to climate change (such as field schools in deltas of the western Indian Ocean); and •Embedding research into climate action, advancing the Paris Agreement by accompanying real-world policy implementation and investments to help society learn faster than the climate is changing.  

Over 7 years, the CARIAA program supported collaborative research to strengthen resilience in these hotspots by informing policy and practice. CARIAA brought together more than 450 researchers across 15 countries through four consortia. In 2018, an external evaluation found, CARIAA contributed to the development of over 20 local or national plans and strategies, and to over a dozen policies in 11 countries that now are using research and credible evidence for decision-making. A series of five Novel Insights describe key findings from this work. Here are some highlights. On climate science, including original contributions to the IPCC special report, evidence on implications of 1.5°C warming for hotpots: • At least a quarter of the ice on the Himalayan mountains today will be lost, affecting 13% of the world’s population. • Semi-arid lands will also experience high variations in precipitation, with significant impacts on power production, agriculture and health. • The impact in low-lying deltas will not be measurable until around the 2040s, when the area of land under inundation is expected to be about 2.5 times larger.

CARIAA also tested the effectiveness of adaptation options, based on the grounded experience of people and communities living in climate change hotspots. Examples include mod-roofs to reduce indoor heat stress in Delhi, and flood resistant housing and toilets in Bihar and Bangaldesh. In Pakistan, smallholder farmers switched from diesel fuel and flood irrigation, to solar-powered water pumps and a package of techniques including drip irrigation, multi-cropping, kitchen gardens, and tunnel farming. The result was improved crop productivity and better use of scarce water, and the approach is being scaled by the government to reach 30,000 farmers.