Welcome to Week 4

HELLEN DAWO: Welcome to week four of this course. In this final week, we are going to get practical and explore how climate adaptation solutions have been applied in various places across the globe. To start us off, let’s take a journey to Ethiopia, a country in Eastern Africa. In 2014, a cooperation between the Ministry of Agriculture Ethiopia and the World Bank set out to tackle landslides, erosion, and drought in the country’s Northwest regions. For this, they used sustainable land management as a strategy. They educated farmers and the local administration on the importance of trees and vegetation coverage. They also increased the security of land ownership for smallholder farmers in order to increase their motivation to adopt sustainable land management practises.

The benefits of the project include storage and infiltration of flood and storm water, stabilisation of slopes– Ethiopia is a mountainous country– and maintaining the soil composition. In addition, the locals get income from agriculture, fisheries, and forestry. The cooperation has been so successful that it continues to date. In addition, Ethiopia has become a global leader in sustainable land management. Solutions like this example from Ethiopia that are inspired and supported by nature are what we call nature based solutions. These solutions are cost effective and provide environmental, social, and economic benefits at the same time. The solutions also help to build climate resilience. The benefits of nature based solutions are that they bring nature features and processes to the city’s landscapes and seascapes.

They are locally adapted, resource efficient, and systemic interventions. These kinds of solutions are important because they improve both biodiversity and the livability for neighbouring human populations. This is why this week, we will look at the development of nature based solutions using real life examples of how they have been implemented.