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This paper looks at the political economy of carbon forestry and REDD+ in Mozambique in view of goals for climate compatible development, i.e. simultaneously addressing emission reduction, adaptation and development. Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries and one of the most at risk from the effects of climate change. At the same time, the country has considerable forest resources and is well placed to take advantage of future public or private funding for carbon forestry and REDD+. The paper asks how debates and decisions on REDD+ in Mozambique may shape outcomes for different groups. Using a political economy framework, the paper considers actor perspectives, interests and interrelations in the broader institutional and political context in order to analyse and the prospects for carbon forestry and REDD+ to contribute climate compatible development in Mozambique.

The report is submitted for COMMENT and DISCUSSION under Agenda Item 5 of the 15th ENVIRONET meeting. It was prepared as part of the work of the OECD-DAC Task Team on Social Protection. Following integration of the comments from ENVIRONET Members, the paper will be issued as a Development Cooperation Working Paper. The report is tabled at ENVIRONET as an input for the discussion on future work priorities in the area of development co-operation and climate change. Members are asked to consider whether and how work on the connections between social protection, climate change adaptation and the promotion of more resilient, sustainable and greener livelihoods, might usefully be taken forward by ENVIRONET and/or by the Task Team on Climate Change and Development Co-operation.

This paper analyses emerging policy discussions on climate change and agriculture in Kenya. Kenya has been ahead of many other countries in developing a national climate change strategy, and agriculture is one of the key critical sectors of interest. However, there are concerns about whether policy goals may be achieved amidst the actors’ many and diverging interests. This paper sets out to map how these debates are starting to take place in practice, and poses the following questions: what are the arguments, who is promoting them, and what are the implications for Kenya’s agricultural sector? A better understanding of the key actors, their interests and through what narratives actor-interests are mobilised is important because they will all have implications for the kinds of support farmers at the local level do or do not receive, and the extent to which their own interests are fore grounded or marginalised within the policy process. Ultimately, the policy response to climate change in the agricultural sector is one important factor which mediates local-level vulnerability.

Adaptive Social Protection refers to efforts to integrate social protection (SP), disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), the need for which is increasingly recognised by practitioners and academics. Relying on 124 agricultural programmes implemented in five countries in Asia, this article considers how these elements are being brought together, and explores the potential gains of these linkages. It shows that full integration is still relatively limited but that, when it occurs, it helps to shift the time horizon beyond short-term interventions aimed at supporting peoples’ coping strategies and/or graduation objectives, towards longer-term interventions that can help promote transformation towards climate and disaster resilient livelihood options.

Resilience is becoming influential in development and vulnerability reduction sectors such as social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Policy makers, donors and international development agencies are now increasingly referring to the term. In that context, the objective of this paper was to assess in a critical manner the advantages and limits of resilience. While the review highlights some positive elements –in particular the ability of the term to foster integrated approach across sectors– it also shows that resilience has important limitations. In particular it is not a pro-poor concept, and the objective of poverty reduction cannot simply be substituted by resilience building.

One major policy challenge for the agricultural sector is to make sure that lessons from farmers' knowledge and experience are informing emerging climate change policy processes. This briefing paper reports on lessons from recent studies in two areas: first on seasonal forecasting and indigenous knowledge in Kenya, and second, agro-ecological knowledge and science in Namibia.\ud \ud Advocates of local knowledge playing a role in adaptation policy and practice need a clearer understanding of how policy processes really work, in order to be more effective in making it happen. Efforts to link local to national are subject to broader processes of global change. Two of these are particularly discussed: first, the prospect of accelerated and more dangerous climate impacts by the 2060s; and second, deagrarianisation (a long-term shift away from farming livelihoods in rural areas).

The Learning Hub is a transformative way of learning and sharing, bridging academic knowledge with invaluable insights from frontline practical experience. The Hub’s second learning cycle focused on perhaps the\ud overarching challenge at the heart of climate change and development. How do we ensure that we tackle poverty and its root causes in ways that are adaptive and low-carbon? The two main ways that were used to explore this\ud question were a) the framing paper and b) the learning event, held in Addis Ababa in March 2011. The purpose of this paper is to bridge the\ud thinking and learning that came out of the framing paper and the debates sparked by it at the learning event.