CCL was invited by its financial partner Bort für die Welt, and the CCDB Climate Center to join the Regional Conference Climatizing Sustainable Development and Human Rights, hold in Sreepur, Bangladesh on September 25-27, 2022.
As one of the panelist invited to give a speech on September 27, Manivone Vorachak, CCL’s Director, shared an important message on how civil society organisations can empower the most vulnerable ones to face the negative impacts of climate change (see the full text of the speech below):
Impacts of climate change in Laos: a brief overview
“Dear all, dear organisers, I am Manivone Vorachak, the director of the NGO Cooperation Committee with Laos, a French organisation operating exclusively in Laos since the 1980s. It is a pleasure for me to join the conference and to meet you all. Thank you for the opportunity to join the panel today. I will speak about the question of building the climate resilience of the most vulnerable, based on our experience in Laos.
In Laos the latest climate change scenarios from the IPCC[1] are highlighting that the impacts of climate change will be even heavier than their global average. The main impacts of climate change that Laos will face in the upcoming years are a continuous increase in the temperature[2], an increase in the number of hot days, an increase of the frequency and the intensity of the floods and droughts and of tropical storms[3]. These impacts will lead to crop harvest losses, water issues, increase of human disease outbreaks[4] and of pest pressures on the crops[5].
The rural communities are vulnerable to climate change impacts:
In Laos, around 70% of the population directly rely on agriculture and natural resources (mainly forest products) for its livelihood which make the country very sensitive to climate change[6]. Moreover, the rural communities are lacking knowledge on climate change issues, leading to a low level of preparedness to its impacts. Poor, remote and poorly informed, the communities are also lacking financial capacities to anticipate or respond to climate change impacts. Thus, these communities are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The effects of climate change can already be observed in Laos: from 1999 to 2018, Lao PDR was ranked the world’s 22nd most climate vulnerable country[7]. Due to the covid-19 pandemic, the current macro-economic context, and with the high inflation rate, Laotian people are losing financial capacities and turning even more and more vulnerable.
An unfair situation and a question of climate justice:
Furthermore, Laos is a low greenhouse gases emitter: in 2019 Laos represented 0.08% of the global GHG emissions[8], including the emissions due to land use changes[9]. Along the time, both the country and the rural communities have been very low contributors to climate change.
In this respect, it is quite unfair that these communities who have been contributing so sparsely to climate change are among the ones who will be the most impacted! Strengthening their resilience capacity is then a question of climate justice.
What can be done to respond to this unfair situation? As civil society organisations, how can we support the most vulnerable ones to increase their resilience to climate change?
Diagnosis and awareness raising: the first steps to build the resilience
First, the civil society should work on awareness, work on the spreading of information on climate change and increase its understanding among the population. The objective of this first step is to raise awareness on the causes and the consequences of climate change. But also, to raise awareness on the vulnerability of the people and communities. Because being aware of what is happening, and of our own vulnerability, underlies any actions taken by the vulnerable ones to increase their socio-economic and environmental resilience.
To raise awareness among both individuals and communities, we should organise information sessions on the climate hazards. This allows to share basic knowledge and allows everyone to understand the causes and consequences of climate change, using the latest science results. This requires an important effort to build the capacities of CSO staff and to train trainers from the local authorities. This education work should be adapted to the different publics, from villagers to farmers and workers. A great lever to raise awareness within the population is also to work with children, as children are our future and can, as of now, share their knowledge and inspire their parents.
Once the communities are aware of the hazards they could face due to climate change, the next step would be for the civil society organisations to work with them to evaluate their vulnerability. Investigating the vulnerability means to answer the following questions: what is my, or our, level of exposure to climate hazards? What is my level of fragility? What is my resilience capacity? This should be done in a participatory way, with active involvement of the communities and the vulnerable ones, to allow high levels of understanding and ownership of the diagnosis. For example, we can organise collective workshops to investigate these questions with the vulnerable ones.
At this stage, the vulnerable ones are understanding the climate change impacts and to what hazards they are exposed to. They also understand their level of vulnerability and what factors are increasing their vulnerability. Actually, the result of this understanding is to formalise their climate risk assessment. This climate risk assessment is the basis to empower people on these questions and to build their willingness to get actively involved in building their resilience.
But knowing the hazard we are facing, as well as our vulnerability to these hazards and the causes of our vulnerability are not enough to reduce the risks we are facing. It is just the first step. As the vulnerable ones have no direct influence on the climate itself, the only option to reduce the risks they are facing is to reduce their vulnerability, by reducing their fragility and increasing their resilience. How can we reduce the fragility and increase the resilience of the most vulnerable ones? How CSOs can facilitate the adaptation of the most vulnerable ones?
Taking actions to reduce fragility and increase resilience
Among the most vulnerable ones are the persons who directly rely on natural resources and weather conditions to sustain their livelihoods, like rural communities, farmers, and fishermen.
Ensuring that they will preserve their access to the natural resources in the long-term is then a key issue. To do so, CSOs together with the beneficiaries can investigate both their practices and the expected impacts of climate change on the natural resources, to define a sustainable management of the natural resources. For example, in Northern Laos, communities rely on the non-timber forest products for their livelihoods, like the bamboo shoots or the wild forest tea. The access to these resources is also a key coping strategy in case of crises, as in situation of poor harvests due to weather shocks (like droughts and floods) or socio-economic shocks (as the covid-19 pandemic and its consequences in terms of access to markets). To avoid the depletion of these NTFPs, we should work with the communities to create rules to use non-destructive collection techniques, create quotas and periods of collection, create and strengthen village committees that will keep on informing the villagers and ensure that the rules are duly followed.
The access to these natural resources is based on the access to lands and collective areas and is therefore linked with the enforcement of land rights. To ensure a relevant land access and use, CSOs can work on information about land rights, participatory design of land use plans, and support to individuals and communities when their land rights are violated.
Furthermore, farmers are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. In South-East Asia the trend has been to simplify the farming systems with the objective to create higher incomes and export commodities, leading to mono-cropping and industrial animal raising and its negative externalities, such as soil erosion, loss of soil fertility, higher incidence of pests… And the climate change will worsen the negative externalities of industrial farming. However, these risks can be mitigated thanks to diversified farming systems, that favour positive synergies between the crops and between plants and animals. This is the goal of agroecology: to maximise the ecological processes to sustainably enhance the performances of the agroecosystems. To boost the development of agroecological systems, we can set up in-situ experiments, provide technical training, deliver material and seedlings to the poorest ones, organise peer-to-peer exchanges. Depending on the soil-climate context, value chains context and farmers wills, the support to agroecology can take the form of agroforestry systems, mix-cropping, crop-livestock integration, drought-resistant systems etc. CSOs can also play a key role in supporting the development of value chains that will foster the agroecological productions.
In any cases, farmers and fishermen need to access to Climate Services to adapt their work based on accurate weather forecasts. As we have seen during the roundtable sessions yesterday, the CSO can facilitate the farmers access to weather forecast on mobile applications and train them to make climate-smart decisions on their farm.
So far, I spoke about actions that can be done at individual and community levels. However, these actions should be integrated within a broader scope, to integrate the decisions of individuals and small groups within the territorial dynamics. How to ensure that the territories where the most vulnerable ones live, can resist to climate change impacts? How to ensure that the adaptation decisions taken by the most vulnerable will not be hindered by the mistakes in terms of territorial development?
On such questions, there is a need to actively involved the different levels of the decision-making process, the different local stakeholders. The objective is to get a clear and systemic picture of how the territory, the landscapes, the river basins, can be adapted to face climate change impacts. A climate-oriented land-use planning process, that leads to restore the riparian forests, or to cancel the draining of a wetland, or to create an integrated water management system solving upstream-downstream issues, are strong levers to reduce the vulnerability of the communities. Based on multi-stakeholder workshops, this consultation process leads to an advocacy work toward decision-makers and financial institutions. The civil society can facilitate the participatory design and setting up of such Nature-based solutions.
Key take-aways and steps forward
To summarize, the most vulnerable ones to climate change impacts are most often persons and communities that have been very low contributors to climate change. Supporting them to mitigate the risks they are facing is therefore a question of climate justice. To build their resilience, the first step is to raise their awareness of their vulnerability and of the levers to reduce their fragility, through information sessions, diagnosis, and participatory climate risk assessments. This is a basis to empower the vulnerable ones on climate change issues and to pro-actively build actions. Key actions that can be undertaken are:
- to support the protection and sustainable management of the natural resources to which the vulnerable ones depend, including the access to lands,
- to support the diversification of the incomes and of the production systems, for example through agroecology, and strengthen the related value chains,
- to facilitate the access to climate services,
- to support the development of Nature-based solutions, for example by organising multi-stakeholder consultations, actions at landscape levels and advocacy work.
All these actions are interrelated and will all serve as levers to build the resilience of the population. The individual actions need to be integrated within the overall territory, in a holistic and participatory way. All the different actions mentioned, which was not a comprehensive list, are linked with the protection of the environment through active involvement of the different stakeholders, from the most vulnerable ones to the decision-makers, individually and collectively.
This is the time to rethink our relationship with our environment. We need to switch to a new paradigm, from the vision that we are extracting our livelihood from the environment toward the vision that our societies are an actual part of this environment and should adapt to its changes. The civil society organisations, as independent organisations focussing on the long-term well-being of the society, can be cornerstones between researchers, local decision-makers, financial organisations, and the population, to facilitate the adaptation and build the resilience of the most vulnerable ones to new climate conditions.”
References:
[1] IPCC: International Panel on Climate Change
[2] Temperature increases of 0.1 – 0.3°C per decade since 1951 (almost twice the rate of global average warming), projected to increase by at least another 1.76°C from 2020 to 2060.
[3] Climate Change Knowledge Portal, accessed in July 2022
[4] Including increase of the incidence of malaria and dengue
[5] Examples, already observed in Laos: African Swine Fever, locust invasion, fall army worm, Newcastle disease…
[6] Climate Risk Country Profile: Lao PDR (2021): The World Bank Group and the Asian Development Bank.
[7] German Watch Climate Risk Index
[8] Laos emitted a total of around 39.4 megatons of CO2 equivalent
[9] Climate Watch, Historical GHG emissions, method: CAIT / Total emissions including LUCF / All GHG. Laos = 5.5 tons of CO2eq per person