ARUA-CD: Building African Capacity for Climate and Development Challenges

The ARUA Centre of Excellence in Climate and Development (ARUA-CD) tackles the triple challenge of enabling development that is equitable, resilient to existing and expected climate risks and impacts, and is low in carbon emissions such that African contributions to global warming is reduced. Essentially, ARUA-CD is a strategic, collaborative pan-African response to the climate and development challenges of the continent and the urgent knowledge and capacity needs required to address these. The community of professionals and researchers working on the complex interrelationships between climate change and development is relatively small throughout Africa. Greater expertise is needed to: (i) understand the climate and development challenges threatening the continent's current and future well-being; (ii) co-produce knowledge with society on how to respond to these new risks and challenges, and (iii) co-design, evaluate and sustain context-specific and culturally appropriate innovations and solutions that cut across the SDGs. African-led, engaged transdisciplinary research that spans local, national and transnational scales can help do this by providing the evidence and impetus required for effective climate change policies, strategies and actions that support societal innovation and adaptation to a new and uncertain future.

The ARUA-CD consists of three core partners; the University of Cape Town (the African Climate and Development Initiative is the CoE Secretariat and Southern African regional hub), the University of Ghana (the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies is the West African regional hub, and the University of Nairobi (the Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation is the East African regional hub). Each of these CoE members have extensive existing capacity, local and international networks and research and student teaching experience in climate change and development, which provides opportunities for synergy and interaction and a foundation on which to build. Each of the regional hubs reach out to other ARUA and non-ARUA universities in their region following a 'hub and spoke' model, with the Centre as a whole bringing these groups together in a pan-African community of practice. Through this, we envisage the ARUA-CD as a leader and source of inspiration for transformative solutions to the challenges of climate change and development in Africa.

The activities described in this proposal all contribute to the core focus of the ARUA-CD, that is, building African capacity for climate and development challenges. Through successful implementation of these activities, this project aims to build capacity in Africa for comparative, engaged and transformative research that enhances decision-making; policy processes and science for impact, towards the goal of an equitable and climate resilient future. These activities build towards supporting capable and skilled African scholars and professionals in confronting the status quo and pursuing state-of-the-art solutions to the complex challenges posed by climate change in Africa. In the vision of improved training and capacity building, we hope to amplify and strengthen African voices in both regional and global platforms. The successful execution of this programme requires efforts in developing open and constructive partnerships with experts, decision-makers, practitioners and with well-targeted communities in order to identify research gaps, co-design projects, co-create knowledge and apply context-appropriate solutions. The activities are designed with the end goal of building a robust and inclusive network of higher education institutions and other partners working on climate change problems and solutions across Africa.

The focus of the ARUA-CD's proposal, 'Building African Capacity for Climate and Development Challenges,' is on the creation of a transdisciplinary network and community of practice that works collaboratively towards more equitable and climate resilient development pathways in Africa. Through building capacity and partnerships across a wide network of actors, and by working at different scales, in different regions, sectors and disciplines, ARUA-CD will link and synthesise local experiences from fragmented contexts in Africa. In this way it adds African voices to the global climate change narrative. As such, the three-year capacity building programme has direct benefits for local actors participating in the project from east, west and southern Africa across the domains of academia, government and policy, and society, with influence and hence indirect benefits for related actors in these three domains at a broader, global scale. The mechanisms leading to impact on the direct and indirect beneficiaries in these three domains are summarised below.

Academic Beneficiaries have been addressed separately in the Academic Beneficiary section and include (i) scholars in the field of climate change and development on the African continent and beyond, (ii) PhD scholars, postdoctoral fellows and early career researchers, (iii) masters, honours and undergraduate students, and (iv) African and international universities. The Academic Beneficiaries section outlines the benefits of the project in terms of the contribution to new knowledge and the development of research capabilities and networks. In addition to knowledge and research benefits, there will also be benefits amongst academics who are lecturing. These include improved curricula and teaching practice through shared cases, updated readings and resources, and exposure to pedagogy and education theory. The Social Learning workshops on curriculum and teaching practice will include a mix of climate change lecturers and education experts and will have indirect and potentially global benefits in terms of Southern and afrocentric pedagogy entering international courses and education practice.

Local- and national-level government officials and policy-makers from Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and beyond will also benefit from engagement in the project. The capacity building workshops on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the implementation of the Paris Agreement, is a key mechanism for supporting African governments in adapting to and mitigating climate change while simultaneously managing a host of other development priorities (a commitment the continent's leader made when adopting Agenda 2063 in2013), while remaining cognisant of national priorities and local-level realities. Indirectly, these workshops and the sharing of information through other communication channels will benefit the communities as awareness is raised around national climate and development policies and their linkages with community level inequality and redistribution. In addition, indirect benefits are expected through strengthening the African voice in global climate change policy narratives that tend to be northern dominated and driven.

Society, in particular local residents, representatives from community organisations and other non-governmental institutions, in the three living landscape sites will directly benefit through engagement in the scoping and synthesising workshops. Through these workshops, local communities will be exposed to the latest climate science and will be able to inform and influence research agendas to ensure that these address local needs for reducing risks and building resilience to climate change alongside other development issues. By engaging in these workshops, meeting and interacting with academic and government representatives, improved trust and collegiality amongst actors with competing values and needs can be built thereby building capacity for long-term collaboration.