Since its establishment in 2011, the Technical Consortium has been working around three work streams:

Baseline datasets and indicators which the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) member states can utilize to measure the progress and impact of their investments and projects on the enhanced resilience of populations in the Arid and Semi-arid Lands in the Horn of Africa.

Methodologies and analytics which member states and other agencies can apply to measure the impact of their interventions and investments towards improving the resilience of populations in the Horn of Africa.

Decision support analysis in the form of tools or models which the member states and others can apply to better target their investments and projects for maximum impact on enhanced resilience for populations in the Horn of Africa.

Which way forward?

The meeting established that future plans for the consortium around these work streams would involve close collaborations with the Kenya’s National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) around information and knowledge management for improved technology uptake. The members of the TC also discussed potential areas which the TC would explore for increased impact. This will involve among others:

• Exploring urban-rural resilience linkages, to investigate the multidimensional issues that connect urban and rural resilience, such as migration, settlements, and livelihood transitions
• Subjective resilience, which will involve exploring how individuals’ perceptions influence their behavior and ability to respond to risks and opportunities
• Exploring agro-pastoralist system dynamics modeling, to integrate agriculture and pastoralism into models for areas in which communities engage in both activities.

Further, it was also agreed that there is need to harmonise food security and resilient measurement, to align resilience and food security indicators

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The conference aimed to:

• Articulate an intellectual framework for resilience;
• Identify key emerging shocks that pose the biggest threats to food and nutrition security, where resilience needs to be significantly strengthened;
• Assess experiences through case studies and draw out lessons from programs, policies, institutions, and investments around the world;
• Identify key approaches and tools to build resilience to shocks;
• Set priorities for action by different actors and in different regions; and
• Identify knowledge and action gaps in research, policy, and programming that need to be met or scaled up in order to successfully build resilience to food and nutrition insecurity.

Conferees represented food and nutrition security, agriculture, humanitarian, and related development sectors as well as actors from government, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, donors, and academia.

See more at: www.2020resilience.ifpri.info

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To encourage wide-ranging debate on the transformation, adaptation and development of societies in the face of change, Resilience 2014 aimed to strengthen and explore the links between the many examples and visions of the resilience of our societies and their environment, whether they come from the academic world or the world of development. The resilience of a social and ecological system (SES) refers to the way in which societies and their environment adapt or change in response to climate, economic and social change, including financial and food crises.

Some of the questions tackled by Resilience 2014:

• To what extent can an SES adapt? When does disruption become too extreme and generate trigger irreversible changes?
• Conversely, how can an SES transform itself and change development track so as to escape from an undesirable situation, such as poverty traps?
• Is the resilience of some the resilience of others?
• What role do knowledge and skills play in these processes?

Resilience 2014 is organized by the “French node” of the Resilience Alliance network (CIRAD – CNRS – IRSTEA- INRA), Agropolis International and their partners of the campus of Montpellier, and built on the highly successful first two conferences in Stockholm and in Phoenix.

For more information, visit www.resilience2014.org

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The tool overlays multiple data layers indicating linkages and dynamic interactions between key indicators in systems affecting resilience. The result is a mapped output depicting a region’s relative resilience, derived from weighted indicators from three key systems: economic, social and ecological. This identification of relative levels of resilience geographically will provide an opportunity for better targeting of investment projects proposed in the drylands’ investment plans for the respective countries.

The pilot development of the spatial tool will be trialled with various drought and environmental planning agencies in the IGAD member states to understand its utility in better enabling the targeting of investments and projects for the most impact in building resilience. Ultimately, it will allow governments in the Horn to host a sector-specific investment platform for improved planning and resource allocation.

The Technical Consortium is currently in the process of developing two versions of the drought module to sit within the spatial tool. Both versions will combine population estimates with the calculation of resilience, in order to focus potential investments on those areas that will see the biggest impact in terms of people helped. The outputs will be similar to those already produced by the spatial tool; a summary map and spreadsheet.

Version 1 uses medium- to long-term data on drought exposure risk to identify areas, across the entire Horn of Africa region, that are in need of resilience investment. It is envisioned that Version 1 will be useful to potential investors considering a variety of sectors such as water management, early warning information systems and conflict reduction.

Version 2 highlights pastoral and agro-pastoral localities where farmers and dependents may be at risk of significant livestock mortalities in the short-term. It is based on short-term rainfall estimates at high geographic resolution and encompasses the outputs of the livestock-vegetation model developed for the Horn of Africa Resilience Project. These outputs are confined to the pastoral and agro-pastoral land use regions. Version 2 will include a new, high-resolution ‘drought exposure’ layer; the existing ‘time to recover’ layer; and a modified ‘environmental sensitivity’ layer.

It is envisioned that Version 2 will be used to identify those areas where investments, such as the promotion of stock movement and reduction, will see the best results. Version 2 may be developed into an early warning system for livestock farmers if the datasets are updated and with possible linking to the Southern Oscillation Index. Discussions are underway on the possibility of a ‘futures analysis’, which can factor in projected climate change, loss of cropland etc.

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