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The role of local institutions in climate change adaptation, mitigation, and justice

Local institutions contribute to climate change adaptation, mitigation, and justice through various ways, including information gathering and dissemination, resource mobilisation and allocation, skills development, and capacity building, providing leadership, and networking with other decision makers and institutions. Local institutions can be public, private, and civic, as well as formal and informal (Agrawal et al., 2008):

  • local public institutions: local governments, local agencies
  • civil society institutions: producer organisations, co-operatives, savings and loan groups
  • private institutions: NGOs and charities, private businesses providing insurance or loans

Local institutions create awareness of climate change issues, raise voices for action, and influence policy makers to integrate climate risks and actions into development planning across sectors and from national to local levels, to make development more resilient to climate change. They play the following roles (Agrawal et al., 2008):

  • Shaping the impact of climate change on communities: Making proper arrangements to reduce its effects on the livelihoods of residents in the region.
  • Shaping the way communities respond to climate change: Providing frameworks within which households and collectives choose adaptation practices.
  • Acting as intermediaries for external support to adaptation, and media through which external interventions reinforce or undermine existing adaptation practices.
Selected cases of local institutions in Africa 

Over the past decades, several organisations, funding agencies, and alliances have implemented numerous climate change adaptation and resilience-building projects in many African countries. Many of these projects and programmes focus on improving reliable and accurate climate information, while others focus on community-level capacity-building training, schemes, and incentives. Below are examples of identified local institutions/initiatives (Kweyu et al., 2023):

  • In 1963–1964, equatorial floods led to a hydromet[1] data sharing agreement signed in 1967 by several countries within the Nile basin, including Uganda. The agreement aimed to improve accessibility to real-time data, knowledge, tools, and partnerships and enhance transboundary co-operation.
  • Technical Cooperation for the Promotion and Environmental Protection of the Nile Basin (TECCONILE) was launched in 1993 by several countries, including Uganda and Tanzania.
  • The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was established in 1999 to promote interaction and shared understanding of basin issues among experts and recommends an all-inclusive co-operation mechanism to address common challenges. NBI monitors climate change explicitly and forecasts the possible impacts on water security.
  • The African Flood and Drought Monitor (AFDM) is an example of recent climate change forecasting models that various governments can utilise for development planning and disaster preparedness.
  • The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), based in Nairobi, provides climate monitoring, prediction, and early warning to various socio-economic sectors in the Greater Horn of Africa Region, including Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
  • Organisations such as the Tanzania Meteorological Authority (TMA), the Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA), and the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) are responsible for collating data from different weather stations, analysing it, and communicating the resulting information to the public in utilisable formats. Weather and climate formats include forecasts for temperatures and rainfall on a daily, weekly, or seasonal basis. Climate communication also provides end-users with tailored climate-related information and knowledge products in a timely way.
  • The Rwanda Environmental Management Authority co-ordinates and oversees all aspects of environmental management for sustainable development in the country (Nkundabose, 2020).

Source: Kweyu et al., 2023.

  1. The term “hydromet” refers to hydrological and meteorological hazards — i.e., extremes of weather, water, and climate (World Bank, 2017). ↵

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Climate Change and Its Impacts: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Climate Justice Copyright © 2024 by Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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