Introduction to livelihoods and climate change

The climate plays a crucial role in the livelihood strategies of millions of people. Climate change is altering the timing, pattern and levels of rainfall and temperature across the globe. Poor communities dependent on natural resources and ecosystem services are especially sensitive to such changes.
Women, with their limited access to assets and decision-making processes, are particularly vulnerable to climate change but also potentially agents of change with a body of knowledge and expertise that can be used in climate change mitigation, disaster reduction and adaptation strategies.

Livelihoods approaches have been used extensively in work on climate change in a number of ways, including:

• helping analyse impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change, often in contrast to top-down climate science, which tends to rely on modelling to predict impacts and develop more generalised adaptation measures
• providing an important conceptual and practical basis to bring together work on poverty alleviation, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation
• forming the basis of much of the on-the-ground vulnerability assessments undertaken in relation to climate change. These have been able to situate climatic factors within the context of vulnerability to a broader range of shocks and stresses.

Situating climate change adaptation within a broader understanding of assets and vulnerabilities has promoted adaptation as a dynamic and flexible process. Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, livelihoods approaches stress strategies that:

• are appropriate to local contexts
• are better able to respond to changing climatic conditions
• recognise vulnerable people's access to a range of assets, and how this access varies within and between households and communities, and between women and men.

This section provides recommended reading and regularly updated resources on livelihoods and climate change.