Climate Change Local Adaptation Pathways (CLAPs) is a collaborative research project funded by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). CLAPs is co-led by IIHS, the University of Exeter (UoE), and the University of East Anglia (UEA), along with the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID) and Gram Vikas. The project tackles climate change adaptation in India’s evolving landscape. This collaborative effort seeks to not only understand current challenges but also generate impactful metrics and pave the way for inclusive, climate-resilient policies and interventions.

Objectives and research questions

The overall objective of CLAPs is to co-create interventions and metrics that enable successful adaptation to climate change. CLAPs will examine existing local climate change adaptation action in Indian cities and rapidly changing rural areas. The project will analyse these actions against current development priorities to help evaluate adaptation pathways that can meet the goals of climate-resilient, migrant-friendly development. The project will also create a set of generalised lessons and evaluative metrics with action partners to provide guidelines and improve policies on climate adaptation based on experiences in India.

Specific research objectives of the project include:

• To create a nuanced understanding of climate change adaptation in India, against current development priorities and urbanisation trends at national, state and city scales.
• To co-develop metrics and evaluation tools that prioritise adaptation pathways thinking and bringing climate action and development priorities together.
• To co-create plausible and place-based adaptation pathways for select locations in India.
• To strengthen the capacities of practitioners, policymakers, and early-career researchers to envision and promote inclusive and equitable climate-resilient development.

Sites of engagement

Research for Impact

Achieving impact through research is at the core of CLAPs. The end goal of the project is to support poor and marginalised communities to successfully adapt to climate change using migration as an adaptation strategy both at source and destination. The project seeks to “change the narrative” on climate migration and develop evidence-based, nuanced narratives on how moving (mobility) and staying (immobility), shape adaptive capacities. The project has six impact goals:

• Centering justice and gender equity in adaptation discourses and evaluations
• Facilitating just relocation
• Generating migrant-sensitive urban adaptation pathways
• Empowering communities to diagnose current drivers of precarity and wellbeing
• Building evidence-based urban and rural futures

To enable this, the project is designed to iteratively and reflexively engage with a range of stakeholders including government and non-government decision-makers, administrators and implementers, academics and vulnerable communities at various scales – local, sub-national and national. CLAPs takes an impact-first approach where multi-stakeholder needs shape our research questions and design.