CSDi Training for Individuals, Communities & Nonprofits
CSDi Training for Individuals, Communities & Nonprofits
Tim gives a summary detailing how you’re going to arrange last week’s climate challenges into a very simple climate project outline showing the community’s prioritized problems, their underlying causes, and their negative impacts.
He stresses how important it is to very clearly define each problem and its underlying cause.
Mr. Magee is CSDi’s Executive Director, and the author of A Field Guide to Community Based Adaptation, Routledge, Oxford, England.
Welcome back to How to Write a Climate Action Plan. Assignment 2 is where the rubber hits the road—so let’s get started!
Last week you worked with community members to better understand their climate challenges and to help them prioritize a list of their challenges.
You’re going to arrange last week’s climate challenges into a very simple climate project outline showing the community’s prioritized problems, their underlying causes, and their negative impacts.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to very clearly define each problem and its underlying cause. If you don’t, your climate plan might work to solve a climate challenge unrelated to your community’s needs. Think about it this way. If you go to the doctor’s office with a runny nose, they will invest time determining specifically why you have a runny nose so that they can treat the correct thing. Is it a cold, or is it a seasonal allergy? It’s equally important to do this with climate challenges as well.
For example, if yours is an agricultural project and the community prioritized a continuing reduction in crop yields, is it because of drought, or eroded soil from extreme rainstorms? It’s important to clearly identify the underlying cause.
In organizing your project outline, the first step is to unravel your community’s prioritized list. They may have given you a list only of underlying causes, but no problems. Or maybe they came up with a list of problems but no underlying causes. So you will need to determine what those missing elements are.
To clarify, problems are the compelling, visible representations of the climate challenges. For example, a farmer might have experienced a flood that flattened crops and left behind mud and debris.
The underlying cause of that flood may have been a climate change-induced, extreme rainstorm.
The negative impact is that the farmer’s farm may not be profitable that season. It may take time for the field to heal, inhibiting the farmer’s ability to lead the prosperous, productive life they need to care for their family.
In creating your project outline, I’m going to ask you to stick to just two of the challenges from your needs assessment—for two reasons. One is that although your outline might look very small and simple now, over the next 8 or 10 weeks, you will add to it solution-oriented programs with their step-by-step activities for each underlying cause. So these project outlines become substantially more complex than today’s simple outline; multipage documents, in fact.
The second reason is that your community may have expressed enough challenges that you will need to develop several projects over several years since they don’t have the resources to do them all at once.
So then, this first project can also be enjoyed as a learning experience so that you will know how to develop another project for next year too.
I’m also going to ask you to maintain the format of my Assignment 2 example. That format becomes the building block for the next assignment. The easiest way to do this is to open up my Assignment 2 example, save it under your own name, and then simply edit it into your project.
Enjoy the process, and I’m looking forward to seeing your good work!
Welcome back to How to Write a Climate Action Plan. Assignment 2 is where the rubber hits the road—so let’s get started!
Last week you worked with community members to better understand their climate challenges and to help them prioritize a list of their challenges.
You’re going to arrange last week’s climate challenges into a very simple climate project outline showing the community’s prioritized problems, their underlying causes, and their negative impacts.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to very clearly define each problem and its underlying cause. If you don’t, your climate plan might work to solve a climate challenge unrelated to your community’s needs. Think about it this way. If you go to the doctor’s office with a runny nose, they will invest time determining specifically why you have a runny nose so that they can treat the correct thing. Is it a cold, or is it a seasonal allergy? It’s equally important to do this with climate challenges as well.
For example, if yours is an agricultural project and the community prioritized a continuing reduction in crop yields, is it because of drought, or eroded soil from extreme rainstorms? It’s important to clearly identify the underlying cause.
In organizing your project outline, the first step is to unravel your community’s prioritized list. They may have given you a list only of underlying causes, but no problems. Or maybe they came up with a list of problems but no underlying causes. So you will need to determine what those missing elements are.
To clarify, problems are the compelling, visible representations of the climate challenges. For example, a farmer might have experienced a flood that flattened crops and left behind mud and debris.
The underlying cause of that flood may have been a climate change-induced, extreme rainstorm.
The negative impact is that the farmer’s farm may not be profitable that season. It may take time for the field to heal, inhibiting the farmer’s ability to lead the prosperous, productive life they need to care for their family.
In creating your project outline, I’m going to ask you to stick to just two of the challenges from your needs assessment—for two reasons. One is that although your outline might look very small and simple now, over the next 8 or 10 weeks, you will add to it solution-oriented programs with their step-by-step activities for each underlying cause. So these project outlines become substantially more complex than today’s simple outline; multipage documents, in fact.
The second reason is that your community may have expressed enough challenges that you will need to develop several projects over several years since they don’t have the resources to do them all at once.
So then, this first project can also be enjoyed as a learning experience so that you will know how to develop another project for next year too.
I’m also going to ask you to maintain the format of my Assignment 2 example. That format becomes the building block for the next assignment. The easiest way to do this is to open up my Assignment 2 example, save it under your own name, and then simply edit it into your project.
Enjoy the process, and I’m looking forward to seeing your good work!
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