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Background and use of SL
This project set out to develop a research method based on the SL framework
to apply to four case studies in Sudan to evaluate the performance of sustainable
livelihoods and environmental management measures for building resilience to today’s
climate-related shocks and their potential for reducing community vulnerability
to future climate change.
Preparation
studies use the DFID sustainable livelihoods model and a notion of the five capitals
(natural, physical, human, social and financial) to capture perceptions of coping
/ adaptive capacity in the data collection process. Each case study focuses on
a single community or group of communities within an ecological/agricultural system
as its unit of research and will explore examples where "local" knowledge
and/or "external" knowledge has been applied within a target community,
in the form of a sustainable livelihoods (SL) strategy, to enable the community
to cope with or adapt to climate-related stress. Case studies compare a community's
vulnerability to climate extremes, pre- and post-SL intervention. For each case
study, a discrete climate-related event - past or ongoing - is identified, around
which the case study is constructed. Within
this framework, the project uses the Livelihood Asset Status Tracking (LAST) system,
an SL monitoring and evaluation tool, to develop indicators to measure changes
in coping and adaptive capacity. The
SL framework was modified in response to the contexts of each case study; work
in preparation will describe these modifications. Preliminary results suggest
that the framework can be a useful tool in understanding the impact of sustainable
livelihood measures in increasing communities’ resilience to climatic stress
– here, mainly drought – from local people’s points of view.
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