How Reality of Resilience can help us learn from climate impacts

Children are regularly told that eating candy and drinking soda will rot their teeth. That doesn’t stop many of them from stuffing their faces with chocolate at any opportunity. Putting principles into practice is not an easy task for individuals, let alone for the large and complex organisations that contribute to BRACED.

The BRACED Knowledge Manager held a webinar addressing this challenge to brainstorm about how partners can learn from climate extremes and their impacts through the Reality of Resilience platform.

Sharing knowledge through the platform on the expected and unexpected ways project efforts worked during a climate shock can help those involved and the resilience community at large learn from BRACED projects.

For example, information on how effective an early warning system, cash transfer programme or other intervention proved in the face of a shock can be documented on the Reality of Resilience platform in the form of a blog, article or photographs, or discussed in a webinar or a discussion forum on the BRACED website

In response to a shock, information can be gathered from a variety of sources – BRACED project and partners staff, regional engagement leaders, journalists, communities and experts on particular themes, such as gender – to provide a diversity of viewpoints from which to examine an extreme event.

During the recent webinar, participants shared their experience with methods for collecting, organising and sharing lessons learned, including SMS and a range of social media, such as Twitter and Whatsapp.

Participants also identified key groups that could potentially benefit from this post-shock information, including governments, policymakers, communities, practitioners and donors.

It was clear that information for these different actors would need to be presented in different ways to be most effective. Libby Plum of Farm Africa mentioned that their field offices rely on paper reports since Internet accessibility is often poor, and that summaries needed to be translated into local languages to be accessible to communities.

Moussa Na Abou, the BRACED Knowledge Manager engagement leader for Niger, suggested that, “nowadays, even the poorest persons in Africa own a cell phone. So, information could be packaged in a way that it could be shared through mobile phones.”

In terms of “packaging” information, Carina Bachofen of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre said, “It’s important to ensure that one person or organization doesn’t speak for many. Packaging information requires working in partnerships and ensuring information flow is two-way.”

This is a challenge that every organization faces, but can be dealt with through face-to-face meetings and clear communication, including using technology such as webinars and discussion forums that allow many people from across the world talk together across distances.

One of those opportunities for sharing knowledge and co-creating ideas will be at the Annual Learning Event in Dakar on February 9-11. A session called “Reality of Resilience: Learning From Disasters Avoided” will give those participating a chance to share successes and challenges from the pilot phase of the project and look ahead to more learning after shocks and stresses from extreme events during the second year of the BRACED programme.