Climatic extremes (such as droughts, floods, and heat waves) are a threat in Africa due to their destructive socio-economic impacts. Global warming is creating conditions conducive to the increased severity and frequency of such events. In this context, it is more important than ever to reframe extremes as physical and socio-economic events, and to understand risks through their impacts on communities, rather than simply on indexes informed by the severity of the hazard. However, climate adaptation research still tends to operate like a directional pipeline that starts with climate information and ends with “users”.

The IDRC-FCDO CLARE-funded PALM TREEs project – launched at the Africa Climate Week 2023 in Nairobi and working in six African countries including Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – takes a different approach and makes climate research driven by the needs and experiences of stakeholders and the community.

This requires reframing our physical understanding and characterization of climate extremes in terms of their impact as they are perceived, felt, and understood by vulnerable communities.

It also requires a bottom-up understanding of how these impacts cascade into an exacerbation of inequality between genders and other intersecting socio-economic inequalities of people living “on the margins” of society in terms of connection to and control of resources, climate knowledge and services, and civil rights. PALM-TREEs then approaches extreme events as multidimensional “compound extremes”.

The Panel will bring together key project team members in a hybrid discussion on the above priorities and approach.