Building Community Resilience; harnessing traditional Ecological knowledge to combat climate change

General

Inspired by OCH and aligned to Africa framework call to enhance local voice and agency, this project will contribute to two outcomes of the Kenya Resilience programme; Outcome 3; Degraded landscapes restored and protected through sustainable land management and providing a stream of ecosystems services Outcome 5: Policy and decision makers are actively implementing plans, budget and initiatives that support environment and food security, water related issues, and livelihoods of women and youth. Phased in annual plans for three years, Jesuit Hakimani through this project is seeking to enhance Voice and Agency of local community in policy dialogue that will lead to understanding impacts of climate change to marginalised and indigenous communities. Traditional ecological knowledge, has potential to play a central role in both indigenous and non-indigenous climate change initiatives also called climate change local adaptation mechanisms. The detection of environmental changes, the development of strategies to adapt to these changes, and the implementation of sustainable land-management principles are all important climate action items that can be informed by traditional ecological knowledge. Intention is to include traditional ecological knowledge as a voice of the local community into climate research, ecological education, resource planning and decision-making processes that should eventually be incorporated, as a local voice & local content into the climate change policy, climate action plans and assessments, and more important for resilience improve adaptation efforts at County, National, and Regional, levels. The two objectives are; 1. Local voices and local content developed to inform training and evidence based advocacy activities 2. Inclusion of indigenous knowledge and information in local, national and regional policy dialogue and advocacy engagements