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Using participatory mapping to manage climate change risks in the Cook Islands
by John Waugh, Mona Matepi, and George de Romilly
In 2010, an innovative map-based approach to climate risk assessment was tested in the Cook Islands as a tool for public engagement in adaptation planning. In partnership with the government and the Asian Development Bank, Te Rito Enua, a Rarotonga-based NGO, field-tested a participatory approach to climate vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning. The project engaged four communities on two islands, Rarotonga and Aitutaki, in combining existing geographic information available from government with local knowledge captured by community members using paper maps and handheld GPS recorders.
 | | Cook Islanders mapping their climate risks |
Participants identified issues that affect the vulnerability of individual households and their wider community using their own frames of reference. The resulting map layers were combined with information from a climate model in common use for planning in the region to produce a vulnerability atlas. These maps were used in community planning meetings as the basis for community adaptation action plans.
This approach generated knowledge unavailable to high-level planners. For example, the readily discernable vulnerability of individual households to changes in water availability due to climate change could inform adaptation programs for water management and conservation. Mapping identified frequently overlooked traditional practices and resources management options that could have considerable value as adaptation measures.
Among its apparent benefits, individuals, families, and communities were empowered to develop their own fine-scale adaptation strategy including measures to enhance the resilience of the natural resource base. The process also generated a strong sense of ownership of the outcomes, increased the knowledge and awareness about the implications for their families, and increased the skills and partnerships needed.
A community-based approach is an important complement to a technically rigorous approach to climate change adaptation planning. The experience showed that adaptation is everyone's business; there is an important role for communities and community-based approaches that cannot be easily addressed through national-level approaches.
For more info or to read the report on this project, click here.
FRAMEweb's GeoExplorer Mapping Tool - UPDATE
By Karishma Patel, (intern for CK2C FRAMEweb)
Since its inception in July 2010, FRAMEweb's GeoExplorer has highlighted over 100 best practices, success stories, and lessons learned in implementing NRM projects generated from some of its 2,800 FRAMEweb members. By highlighting activities, the user-generated mapping tool enables members to see them in a geographic context using political, topographical, or satellite imagery. Among its other features is a global layering capability that can enhance the basic analysis of point and aerial data. GeoExplorer, a web-based Geographic Information System (GIS), is a mapping visualization tool designed to allow natural resource management practitioners to examine and upload activities on the ground in relation to other physical and political layers. For example, a conservationist pursuing a CBNRM initiative the tropical forests of Guyana might could explore the success factors of CBNRM initiatives in similar contexts across the globe. By toggling
 | | FRAMEweb GeoExplorer |
the layering capabilities to determine similar landcover and protected area conditions elsewhere, the conservationist can see that-amid a series of forestry activities-there is a successful community-driven monitoring network in an unprotected East Kalimantan forest that might offer some lessons learned that can be adjusted in designing a fitting CBNRM intervention.
With this kind of information easily available, practitioners can be better prepared to select sites for potential activities, design projects, or determine avenues for collaboration with nearby stakeholders. Other layering capabilities include biomes, watersheds, soils, and tropical forest coverage that practitioners can use for objectives like determining relevant soil types, staking out a network of villages based on watersheds, or exploring the building structures or landcover patterns on the ground using satellite imagery or a landcover layer.
Currently FRAMEweb administrators are working with representatives from USAID, DAI, the US Forest Service, Mendez England, and other international and local organizations to build a database of activities from which practitioners can learn and advance. The system is user-generated, so anyone with a FRAMEweb account can upload activities. In this way, GeoExplorer is able to present useful information, foster knowledge-sharing that can bring local success to scale, and lend itself as a tool to influence good decision-making.
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Over the past few years, we've focused our FRAMEweb editions on sectors and topics from the field, but rarely on a specific technology. We decided the power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other forms of mapping for NRM development was too good to pass up!
