Communication Strategy

Apart from a knowledge management strategy for the climate change community, a communication strategy should likewise be implemented. However, this would be a communication strategy like no other. This chapter provides the rationale for the design of such a strategy based on the unique requirements of the climate change community. It gives an overview of existing initiatives that may contribute to the overall strategy. It reviews the information needs of climate change stakeholders analyzed in Chapter 5 and proposed a three-pronged strategy to fulfill these needs. Finally, it describes a grassroots social mobilization program for vulnerable communities.

Frameworks

This chapter presents the authors' theoretical and methodological frameworks for assessing climate change adaptation. These were framed on the basis of behavioral science and learning theory. A neo-behaviorist lens has been employed in explaining adaptation following the neo-positivist tradition where inquiry is guided by a theoretical framework and implemented with mixed methods of mutually reinforcing qualitative and quantitative strands. The adaptation theme situated within these frameworks is food security. The examples of adaptation practices and technologies all pertain to food and agriculture. The context of adaptation is the agrarian community or the farm family.

Climate Change Discourse and Adaptation Narrative

This chapter defines the dominant climate change discourse and the adaptation narrative linking the latter with mainstream social sciences. As commonly observed, the current discourse on climate change adaptation is rich and dynamic. However, because of the diversity of disciplines engaged in it, the narrative at times would lack coherence as seen in discussion threads on vulnerability, awareness and resilience. The climate change community submits that one's exposure to climate threats, sensitivity to climate extremes and adaptive capacity to climate impacts determine vulnerability to climate risks. Furthermore, the community uses the terms awareness and knowledge interchangeably when the behavioral and learning science traditions make clear distinctions and differentiations between the two. The current discourse also pays emphasis on the words resilience and sustainability and highlights the transdisciplinary nature of each. The authors present their arguments on how these discussion threads should be effectively treated.

Introduction

This introductory chapter describes the reality of climate change and its causes. It begins with a personal account of experiences, progresses to a societal perspective, and ends with a technical appraisal of the phenomenon. Experts characterize climate change by weather extremes, uncertainties and variabilities. The authors express their difficulty in appreciating the arguments of climate change deniers when their experience of the world constantly reminds them of these realities on a month-to-month, week-to-week, or even day-to-day basis. The authors give a non-technical description of the causes of climate change and argue for the anthropogenic view that it is caused by man, citing findings of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. They reiterate the assertion that climate change is both inevitable and irreversible.

Knowledge Management Strategy

The preceding chapters present a systematic argument for those within the climate change community to explore opportunities for interventions that would increase knowledge, change attitudes for the better, and lead to the practice of climate change adaptation. However, exploring these opportunities should be guided by a framework. In this chapter, we propose one such framework, a knowledge management strategy for climate change adaptation. This knowledge management strategy does not only belong under the cognitive domain as argued in Chapter 3. In fact, it straddles all three domains since the affective and psychomotor domains are also influenced by knowledge. Its major assumption is that climate change response (knowledge, attitudes, and practice) can be increased and enhanced through knowledge sharing and reuse.

Case Study

The following case study deals with the Final Evaluation Study of the Philippine Climate Change Adaptation Project. It illustrates how the project evaluation procedure may be used on a climate change adaptation intervention. The study found that 34.18% of farm householders surveyed in the pilot areas were practicing or intending to practice PhilCCAP adaptation technologies. Compared to the baseline figure of 12.47%, there was an increase of 22.42% among farm household adopters of PhilCCAP technologies. A computed value for Outcome Indicator 1 of 34.18% exceeds by 14.18% the target of 20.00% by the end of Year 5. The final results for the stakeholders also proved encouraging. An Outcome Indicator 2 value of 46.53% was computed, which overshot the end of project target of 35.00 percent by 11.53. Compared to the baseline figure of 11.27% among stakeholder respondents, the computed final value for Outcome Indicator 2 represents a leap of 35.26%. The Final Evaluation Study concludes that based on PhilCCAP's two outcome indicators the project has been successful in developing and demonstrating approaches that enabled targeted communities to adapt to the potential impacts of climate variability and change at project's end.

Case Study

This chapter describes how the benchmarking procedure was applied on three groups at different levels of scale: organizational, community, and sectoral. It presents the climate change responsiveness profiles of three sectors: the academe, the youth, and a national government agency, the Department of Agriculture. Climate change responsiveness is defined as a determinant of resilience, along with risks and resources. Responsiveness has three elements: the amount of knowledge gain (?K); the degree of attitude change (?A); and the change in action or practice (?P). Climate change responsiveness (CCRp) profiling used a scorecard with a five-point scale: 1 as very low, 2 as low, 3 as moderate, 4 as high, and 5 as very high. Data gathering was conducted online through the Survey Monkey. Responses from almost 300 respondents resulted in the following scores: Department of Agriculture - 3.93 (high); the academe - 2.8 (moderate), and the youth sector - 2.59 (moderate).

Research Methods and Tools

This chapter details the research methods for assessing climate change adaptation among farm families. The methods cover two types of procedures: benchmarking and evaluation. The authors define benchmarking as the documentation, measurement and analysis of current adaptation practice in any given target group, organization or community for purposes of comparison, internal or external, to a given standard, de facto or otherwise. Benchmarking is not done within the bounds of project parameters (i.e., time and resources) and project-determined outcomes. On the other hand, evaluation refers to baseline, mid-term, final and ex-post measurements of adaptation practice vis a vis given interventions. Evaluation is conducted within set project parameters and project-determined outcomes.