In all our projects, we combine tools from natural and social science, including process and AI-based modelling, remote sensing, ground-based data collection and mixed social science methods.
Current projects
Albatross
Albatross is a research consortium running from 2024-2027 that aims to deliver novel, innovative and co-created climate services and tools that support climate responsive decisions and strategies for nature-based solutions and other adaptations (including mobility).
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The main consortium is made up of six European and African universities as well as Oxfam Italy and Oxfam South Africa, and two European small/medium enterprises. The projects hubs are spread across five countries, one of which is the the Umzimvubu Catchment in South Africa.
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The Nature, People and Climate Lab is leading the Albatross work package 4. In this work package we are using a framework to deepen our understanding of what is needed for nature-based solution and adaptation decisions and planning (from daily decisions to operational or strategic decisions and planning), and mapping those needs onto climate service timescales.
We are also involved in work packages 2, which focuses on modelling feedback dynamics between climate change, and human and ecosystem responses, and in work package 5, which focuses on integrating and translating knowledge into services and products relevant for decision making.
TES NbS
Running from 2021-2024, and with Dr Petra Holden (the Lab’s Director) as its principal investigator, the Towards equitable and sustainable nature-based solutions in southern Africa’s water towers project (TES NbS) was an inter and transdisciplinary research project focused on the nexus of social equity, nature-based solutions, water and climate change.
TES NbS was centred on two research questions:
1. What can we learn about social equity and nature-based solutions from what has been done already?
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Here, all the research and activities pointed to the importance of acknowledging and addressing contextual equity when planning, designing or implementing nature-based solutions. To help people do this, the project team developed an innovative constraints typology that cuts across scales to highlight local constraints (like local gender, social and cultural norms) and higher-level constraints (like the biases and blind spots of funders and implementers), and the ways that these constraints intersect with each other and other dimensions of equity. The project team also expanded on the enablers, opportunities and spaces for actions for each constraint. People can use this tool to cross check their nature-based solution and understand what they need to plan for or address to achieve equity in their specific context.
2. What can we learn about the sustainability of nature-based solutions under increasing levels of global warming?
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Based on process-based hydrological and carbon modelling, and correlative plant species distribution modelling drawing, TES NbS highlighted the importance of ensuring that nature-based solutions are localised and context-specific. It demonstrated the detrimental water-related impacts that misguided nature-based solutions can have at local and regional levels when focusing solely or primarily on global gains such as sequestering carbon. It also highlights the critical importance of holding global warming levels within certain temperature thresholds for safeguarding the benefits of locally appropriate and contextualised nature-based solutions into the future.
Tuwe Pamoja
To be just, sustainable and climate resilient, nature-based solutions need to be locally driven and locally appropriate. For this to happen, there needs to be strong capacity for generating and consolidating the diverse sources of social and ecological data that can inform decisions around the planning, implementation and policy of nature-based solutions.
The Tuwe Pamoja project aims to strengthen this kind of capacity for key actors (city officials, informal residents, non-governmental organisations, community-based organisations and researchers) in urban settlements in Cape Town (South Africa), Lusaka (Zambia), Accra (Ghana) and Nairobi (Kenya).
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The project team will adopt an approach that centres intersectional experiences of marginalisation. It will use a Climate-Resilient Development Pathways framing (Taylor et al., 2023) to support actors to collaboratively engage with different types of evidence, to consider and interrogate benefits and trade-offs associated with adaptation and development decisions over multiple timescales, and to engage with uncertainty.
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Running from 2024 to 2026, Tuwe Pamoja is led by the Universities of Cape Town, Zambia, Ghana, and Nairobi, with project partners spanning academia, grassroots civic organisations, city governments and global city and slum dweller networking organisations.
