A two-day inception workshop was hosted by UKZN’s South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) on Applied Poverty Reduction Assessment within the School of Built Environment and Development Studies (BEDS).

The workshop was organised to launch a new project titled: Climate Change Adaptation and Poverty Reduction Co-benefits: Human Capabilities Towards Green Micro-Enterprise, under the programme to support pro-poor policy development II (PSPPD II).

The meeting helped the new project team understand and discuss the current UKZN projects around climate change and socio-economic dimensions. The aim was to interact with stakeholders around the progress of their projects as well as to identify potential synergies from these related projects. 

The new PSPPD II project involves the examination of the full portfolio of current climate change and poverty reduction co-benefits projects in eThekwini. This portfolio includes both government and non-government supported projects dealing with climate change adaptation, biodiversity and community livelihood interventions.

Such interventions seek to improve community resilience and well-being in the context of future ecological and biodiversity threats.

The SARChI on Applied Poverty Reduction Assessment has already begun work on climate change adaptation and poverty reduction co-benefits research.

Speaking about this, Professor Sarah Bracking said: ‘Given the interdisciplinary nature, the understanding of other UKZN related projects would add value to the context of the research. Research projects such as CLIMAYS and the UKZN/eThekwini Collaborative Research partnership are operating under similar contexts as this new project.

‘There may be shared interest and collaboration in our work and we invited them in order to explore such possibilities. Furthermore, this inception workshop hopes to both improve local and national practice, and to influence wider debates at global scale,’ said Brackling.

CLIMAYS representatives at the workshop, Ms Nolwazi Ntini and Ms Vicky Sim, were excited to be a part of the workshop stating that it was a robust interactive discussion. ‘It’s great to interact with researchers involved in the same strategic policies and to gauge the UKZN influence in this venture,’ they said.

A climate change lecture, delivered by American researcher and the project’s external advisor, Dr Michael Dorsey, examined Oligarchs & Climate Crisis: Implications for Africa and the Planet.  It focused on global climate finance, climate change adaptation and ethnographic methodologies to research the key players in the global climate finance arena.