Large tracts of land at low lying elevation make deltas vulnerable to sea-level rise and other climate changes impacts. Deltas have some of the highest population densities in the world; in total with 500 million, often poor, residents. The adaptive strategies available to deltas residents (e.g. disaster risk reduction, land use management or polders) may not be adequate to cope with pervasive, systematic, or surprise changes associated with climate change. Hence large movements of deltaic people are often projected under climate change. DECCMA is an approximately 5 year long programme of applied research on the adaptation options, limits and potential in deltaic environments to current weather variability and extremes, as well as climate change.

Background

Migration is already an established household adaptation to cope with environmental and economic change. This can be both a successful form of adaptation, increasing the resilience of the migrant household, and unsuccessful, perpetuating vulnerability in a new location with differential impacts on men and women.

The DECCMA project analyses the impacts of climate change and other environmental drivers across contrasting deltas in Africa and Asia. Processes of migration are analysed using survey, participatory research and economic methods. Potential migration of men and women is contrasted with other adaptation approaches using a stakeholder-driven and co-produced integrated assessment approach.

Workpackages

• Work Package 1
  Governance systems and gender-sensitive stakeholder engagement
• Work Package 2
  Vulnerability, hazard and climate change hotspot mapping
• Work Package 3
  Migration as an outcome and determinant of vulnerability in deltaic populations
• Work Package 4
  Economic Modelling of the Impacts of Climate Change in deltas
• Work Package 5
  To produce an integrated assessment tool to assess adaptation and migration in deltas
• Work Package 6
  Identifying and evaluating feasible and acceptable planned and autonomous adaptations