Today marks the launch of the project entitled ”A Pan-African and Transdisciplinary Lens in the Margins: Tackling the Risks of Extreme Events”, which goes by the acronym PALM-TREEs. PALM-TREEs is an ambitious project of the CLARE programme, a UK-Canada research framework programme on climate change adaptation and resilience mainly funded by UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office alongside International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

With a transdisciplinary and Pan-African approach, the project aims to equip marginalized communities to better respond to extreme climatic events in Africa such as droughts, floods and heat waves, as well as to their interconnected and cascading socio-economic impacts.

The team includes social and physical scientists working in partnership with a range of stakeholders to challenge the conventional understanding of extreme climate events by prioritizing the first-hand experiences of diverse communities. The research will simultaneously examine the physical and socio-economic drivers of these extremes and climate risk. The project will highlight how gendered and other intersecting inequalities lead to differential climate risk among marginalised communities and how adaptation can support communities in the physical context of a changing climate.

One of the priorities of PALM-TREEs is to create relevant climate information that responds to the needs and experiences of less privileged groups and local risks. Adopting a co-production approach, researchers will work closely with stakeholders to develop new approaches to make this climate information more usable and accessible.

The project will also focus on strengthening the inclusive and equitable knowledge networks needed to support climate resilience. By actively involving marginalised people in the research, the project will explore how extreme events interact and exacerbate situations of marginalisation in various climatic contexts.  In addition, about twenty graduate students will be supported with fellowships to undertake physical and social research across the six countries concerned (South Africa, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and DR Congo).

PALM-TREEs will be implemented over a period of three and a half years by a consortium of universities and institutions led by the University of Cape Town, the University of Yaoundé 1 and the University of Oxford. The project is managed by a Consortium Manager and Principal Investigators responsible for coordinating research in Southern, Central, East and West Africa.

For more information on the project and to keep up to date with developments, please contact

Edith ABILOGO, PALM-TREEs Communication & Knowledge Exchange Manager, REFADD Cameroon, Tel: +237 699 52 49 05, E-mail: palmtrees@refadd.net, e.abilogo@refadd.net, abilogo@yahoo.fr