The Partnership for Canada-Caribbean Community Climate Change Adaptation

Thousands of kilometres separate Negril in Jamaica and Lunenburg in Nova Scotia but one project is finding common ground between them.

The Partnership for Canada-Caribbean Community Climate Change Adaptation, or ParCA, is a five-year research programme investigating the ways Caribbean and Canadian coastal communities are grappling with long-term shifts in the environment and what they can teach each other.

It combines science and local knowledge to paint a big picture of change in four dramatically different places and pinpoint where those developments overlap. The four sites are Negril in Jamaica, Speyside to Charlotteville in Trinidad and Tobago, Lennox Island to Rustico in the Prince Edward Islands, and Lunenburg to Queens in Nova Scotia.

Beyond the obvious contrasts, the sites share some vulnerabilities and economic characteristics: each is making the switch to high-value tourism, each has strong links between fishing and tourism and each relies in big part on nearby protected marine zones. Learning how these factors play out in each area could be the start of a chain of best practices linking communities around the world.

Researchers will use the results to scale up plans to the national and regional levels, exploring where the authorities can sustainably develop a range of sectors, from coastal management and tourism planning to disaster preparedness and infrastructure.

The project is driven by a fundamental need to have people on the ground define just how and where their communities are vulnerable to climate change and what factors stand in the way of adaptation. The support and input of residents is critical if ideas for adaptation are to take root and grow into global collective knowledge.

That input is also essential if people are to come together around their common interests and use the strength of their combined local experience and resources to face challenges well into the future. ParCA’s goal is to leave a lasting legacy of shared awareness and information so that communities can find answers within themselves.

A big part of the endeavor will be to forge stronger scientific and professional research links between Canada and the Caribbean and train the next generation of highly qualified personnel. Scholarships will be awarded to many Caribbean nationals to conduct post-graduate studies at the Masters and PhD levels in various disciplines, ensuring ParCA’s ambitions live on well beyond the life of the project.

ParCA is a CARIBSAVE project conducted in partnership with the University of Waterloo (Canada).

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For further details about this initiative, visit the ParCA website: parca.uwaterloo.ca

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The overall objective of the five-year Partnership for Canada-Caribbean Community Climate Change Adaptation (ParCA) research programme, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), is to utilize a common community-based vulnerability assessment (CBVA) framework to integrate scientific and local knowledge from comparative ‘learning sites’ to understand the multi-scale socioeconomic, governance and environmental conditions that shape vulnerability and capacity to adapt to climate change within and between communities.

Four ‘Learning Sites’ have been strategically selected to take advantage of existing research networks of the research team, as well as common vulnerabilities and economic characteristics (e.g., high value tourism economy, tourism-fishery linkages, and significance of nearby protected areas to community livelihoods). These shared characteristics will serve to maximise the transferability of knowledge and best-practices to the hundreds of communities that will face common challenges in the Caribbean and Atlantic Canada.

The four sites (two in the Caribbean and two in Canada) are:

1. Jamaica: Negril to Montego Bay (Northwest shore)


2. Trinidad and Tobago: Speyside to Charlotteville [including Little Tobago], Tobago)


3. Prince Edward Islands (PEI): Lennox Island to Rustico (North shore)


4. Nova Scotia: Lunenburg to Queens (South shore)

Five principles guide the ParCA project: 1) application of a community?based vulnerability assessment (CBVA) framework to identify, in collaboration with communities and partners, exposure?sensitivities and associated adaptation strategies; 2) addressing key data gaps that constrain adaptation efforts in the Caribbean and Atlantic Canada; 3) participatory development and evaluation of adaptation portfolios; 4) ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘scaling?up’ of adaptation planning to incorporate local perspectives and values into governance arrangements for climate change adaptation; and 5) mobilising knowledge and empowering communities and partners to respond to climate change.

The approach directly meets the need for participatory community based adaptation research in the Caribbean region. CBVA has proven an effective tool for community engagement in the dialogue on adaptation, with strengths that include highlighting the needs of the various stakeholders within communities, the integration of local-traditional knowledge, and the identification of existing adaptation practices and contributors to adaptive capacity. The approach also identifies the role of climate-related exposures in the context of other, non-climatic stresses and highlights the necessity of understanding that adaptation decisions to climate change are rarely made in isolation from other social, economic and political concerns.

 

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