This report collates and synthesises evidence from year one annual reports in order to understand how Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) projects are building resilience. The report identifies emerging themes, challenges and draws broader lessons about changes in resilience, as well as how these can be understood and the factors that shape them. Insights from BRACED Year 1 aims to contribute to ongoing evidence and lesson generation efforts at the project and programme levels.
The report finds that there are emerging examples of capacity-building activities leading to changes in attitudes, behaviour and practice in relation to climate resilience planning, agricultural practices and production through market-based approaches and access to finance and savings for asset building and livelihood diversification. However, further steps are necessary to consolidate this and ensure the sustainability of emerging changes.
Key messages include the following:
- Accessing and using weather and climate information is a critical element in building anticipatory, absorptive and adaptive capacities;
- Achieving meaningful resilience outcomes requires knowledge, skills and capacities that require effective partnerships;
- The starting point for enhancing individuals’ resilience is recognising and addressing social exclusion and gender inequality;
- Building anticipatory and absorptive capacity to deal with current risks and threats is the first step for communities that are highly vulnerable to climate change;
- While resilience-building interventions have building capacity to manage shocks and stresses as a primary objective, addressing and dealing with the socio-economic and political dimensions of resilience-building are equally important;
- While resilience-building projects focus on building anticipatory, absorptive and adaptive capacity to shocks and stresses, in practice resilience-building programmes seem to be, at their core, ‘good’ development projects with ‘tweaks’.
