GCAP Blog

Nice to catch up with Ian Burton at the ECCA 2017 in Glasgow last week. Ian might be described as Sir (all hail!), Don (from his mafia days) or Saint (revered). I was mentored by Gilbert White and Bob Kates, and then worked with Ian on various disruptive frameworks (remember the Adaptation Policy Framework? Still cited in Google Scholar!). BKW were known back in the day as the innovative inspiration for a generation or two of work on natural hazards. I'll settle for friend and inspiration for a label.

In previous lives both Tom and I were involved in founding weADAPT, which is run by our friends down the road at SEI Oxford. Amazingly, weADAPT is now celebrating 10 years as an online platform for sharing knowledge, tools and case studies around climate adaptation!

We'll be at the European Climate Change Adaptation Conference in Glasgow this week, mostly in the Business and Innovation sessions. We're excited to be pitching in the Resilience Innovation Challenge on Wednesday, and looking forward to seeing old and new faces! Hoping for lots of stimulating conversations and good discussion around our work on Private Markets for Climate Resilience. See you there!

So Trump has done what he always looked likely to do, and let the climate deniers around him pull the U.S out of the Paris Accord. This is a massive failure of U.S leadership, but how much does it really affect action on climate change? Judging from early reaction, and the noises we've heard over the last 6 months the answer is. . .not much.

Frank Thomalla let us know that the Asia Center in Bangkok just joined the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk network. He leads an initiative on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk, now in its second phase. This network and initiative are key to bringing disasters and adaptation together. Both need to move along the continuum from 'good resource management' to transformations that are prepared for the coming climeractic.