Northern team meeting
Even with the abundance of technological advances and communication options, the DECCMA team recognises and highly values extended time for face-to-face meetings. In May the DECCMA Northern team, a sub-set of the wider consortia, led by the University of Southampton met in Bilbao, Spain for three days. The Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), a sub-contractor of Southampton, hosted the meeting in their offices in central Bilbao. As well as BC3 and University of Southampton team members, the meeting was attended by partners from the University of Exeter, University of Dundee, Plymouth Marine Laboratories (PML) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
The Northern Team meet every six months, in-between six monthly whole consortium meetings which involve the full project team with partners from Bangladesh, India and Ghana present. The objectives for Northern Team in Bilbao were to examine research progress by work package, review communications and team building across the consortium, discuss project outreach and publication plans and crucially, consider the basis for a coherent and well-structured Research into Use (RiU) strategy for the project.
Stakeholder mapping for the study sites were reviewed with discussions focusing on how the project can encourage stakeholders with a low interest but high potential influence to become more engaged with the project. Analysis of governance policy and acts has started, with a broad collation of available literature for the delta study sites; next steps will involve analysing policies for a better understanding of how internal movements of people may or may not be encouraged. Corresponding stakeholder workshops have been held in study sites to supplement this work.
GIS experts and biophysical environmental modellers have been collecting data on climate hazards (flooding, salinity levels etc) from study sites to construct first pass hazard vulnerability maps for the project study sites. The overlaying of these hazard vulnerability maps with separate migration maps produced from demographic analysis of census data by the projects migration work package will be the basis for sampling for the project’s household survey. These linkages were discussed by socio-economic and bio-physical experts alike to start the process of developing a robust and comprehensive sampling strategy.
DECCMA’s household survey will provide valuable insight into the drivers of migration and the decision process that drives community and family level adaptation choices. The design of this survey was discussed across all work packages to ensure that the questions are carefully crafted so that results feed into the areas that the project requires. One set of deliverables within the project is to provide criteria for evaluating the success of adaptation and migration in deltas, leading to the development of a rule-set for each. The process of defining ‘success’ was discussed in breakout sessions, starting with the identification of key criteria and indicators used to score them.
DECCMA will combine a section of project results into a policy-relevant integrated assessment tool, enabling scenarios to be run through the model, producing plausible and possible future states for a range of thematic areas. The conceptualisation of the factors that contribute the integrated tool have been formalised in a draft framework, which was circulated around the project for comment in early 2015. A revised draft framework was discussed at this meeting, along with a potential basis for the integrated assessment tool, the Delta Dynamic Interactive Emulator Model (DIEM) used in the ESPA Deltas project. Furthermore, an iterative learning loop of policy interaction and scenario development was tabled for discussion. This loop will take simulations that the integrated assessment tool produces back to stakeholders for discussion, to see if how they rate the plausible future that was generated under their initial scenarios, and to discuss what policy decisions they might lead to that result.
A large portion of the workshop was dedicated to discussing the development and articulation of a clear RiU strategy for the project. The team reviewed components that should be included in the strategy and identified where across the project they were already developed and need combining into one document. A precise ‘two-pager’ was developed to summarise the project’s impact aims, methods and activities that will be involved in achieving these goals and required resourcing. This will be developed into a full RiU strategy.
The workshop closed with planning for the upcoming DECCMA Whole Consortium Workshop in Ghana in July, the next occasion where representatives of the entire DECCMA project from Bangladesh, India, Ghana and the UK meet.