THE CLARS PROJECT
Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategies
Shifting the traditional North-South model to facilitating South-North and South-South knowledge exchange on climate adaptation.
Exploring Socio-Economic Vulnerabilities among Urban Migrants in Lake Victoria and Great Lakes Region.
Bringing together numerous partners from over 8 countries, CLARS will run for 3 years (2024-2027).
The CLARS Project investigates the challenges faced by climate migrants and host communities in key urban areas in the Lake Victoria Basin and the Great Lakes Region. This innovative research explores the opportunities and threats currently existing in the Lake Victoria region and apply the findings to plan for climate-induced migration in the Laurentian Great Lakes. The CLARS project offers a platform to share replication and scaling of successful interventions and lived experiences with the possibility for the North (GLR) and South (LVB) stakeholders to learn from each other. It aims to develop co-produced adaptation strategies for reducing socioeconomic vulnerabilities (SEVs) and building resilience for vulnerable climate migrants and host communities across five Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) and Great Lakes Region (GLR) urban cities of Kampala, Mwanza, Eldoret, Detroit, and Hamilton. The CLARS project connects eight partners in seven countries, merging together interdisciplinary research methods with local participants from both GLR and LVB regions to generate locally co-produced knowledge for reducing socioeconomic vulnerabilities (SEVs) and building resilience for vulnerable climate migrants and host communities. This project comprises an international consortium of universities and research institutes, funded through the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF, Canada). It also includes funding from the US National Science Foundation, the UK Research and Innovation fund and the German Research Foundation, DFG.
Integrated Research Clusters
The project consists of integrated work packages that:
1. Examines the effectiveness of international and national policy responses to climate change and operationalise recommendations that meet the socioeconomic needs of climate migrants.
2. Produces and shares LVB and GLR urban climate predictive data and scenarios on urban migration flows, that assess risks and socioeconomic protective factors and quantify climate impacts.
3. Co-develops inclusive climate adaptation and resilience strategies that avert, minimise, and address climate migrants’ socio-economic vulnerabilities in both lakes-regions.
4. Stimulates knowledge exchange to advance co-production and learning, inspiration and sharing of climate adaptation and resilience strategies and policies that improve migrants and host citizens’ SVEs across LVB and GLR urban settings.
Guided by Oral Traditions and Traditional Ecological Knowledge
The CLARS team will engage First Nations communities by holding listening-sessions with Knowledge Keepers to help inform nonindigenous research, and to determine areas of alignment and areas of divergence. This will inform policy recommendations for all orders of government in planning for Climate migration.