3rd Resilience Academy: Enhancing Resilience to Minimize Loss and Damage - Providing Knowledge for the UNFCCC

The Resilience Academy

In the most vulnerable regions of our planet, the impact of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and cyclones threaten lives and livelihoods. The most affected regions include large deltas, small islands and exposed coastal regions as well as arid and semiarid lands, and areas affected by glacier and permafrost melt. People on the frontlines of climate change face severe risks from extreme weather and slow onset processes, including coastal inundation, catastrophic floods, and extended drought conditions. These stresses have the potential to render spaces effectively unproductive and uninhabitable. A central question for practice, policy and research revolves around the resilience of peoples whose livelihoods systems and settlements are threatened. The Resilience Academy will provide a platform for connecting communities of expertise (early phase practitioners, academics and policy analysts), examining livelihood resilience in the face of extreme weather events and slow-onset environmental changes.

Theme: Enhancing Resilience to minimize Loss and Damage – Providing Knowledge for the UNFCCC

The Resilience Academy 2015 in Bangladesh and the Resilience Academy 2016 in Germany will produce, combine and share knowledge about enhancing livelihood resilience to minimize loss and damage.

Loss and damage is an emerging topic in climate change negotiations, research, policy and implementation of climate change action, and is expected to grow in importance after the establishment of the "Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts" in December 2013. Loss and damage refers to impacts of climate-related stressors that have not been or cannot be avoided through mitigation and adaptation efforts. Loss and damage can result from sudden-onset events as well as slowonset processes, and includes economic as well as noneconomic losses and damages.

Questions and sub-themes addressed in the 2015 and 2016 Resilience Academies include, but are not limited to:

- How can building livelihood resilience help minimize avoidable L&D?
- How can unavoidable L&D be addressed without undermining livelihood resilience?
- How do slow-onset environmental changes lead to L&D?
- What methods exist for valuating non-economic L&D?
- What limits and constraints to adaptation exist in different parts of the world?
- What L&D can be attributed to global warming?
- What are acceptable and intolerable climate risk?
- What are tipping points and how can we detect them?
- How can migration and insurance help address L&D?
- What is transformative adaptation and how can it help?
- How can the activities of the Warsaw International Mechanism be made most effective for addressing L&D?
- How should finance for addressing L&D in vulnerable countries be organized under the UNFCCC?

To apply, please provide the following

- One concise paragraph describing how your work relates to the central theme of the 2015 and 2016 Academies:
Enhancing Resilience to Minimize Loss and Damage – Providing Knowledge for the UNFCCC;
- An up-to-date CV, including a list of publications;
- A letter of recommendation.

Advanced English language skills will be necessary.

Please, send all materials in one email with the subject line “ACADEMY” to: resilience.academy@ehs.unu.edu

Deadline for application: 31 January 2015
Decision will be made by end of March 2015