The impacts of a capacity-building workshop in a randomized adaptation project

Francisco Alpízar, María Bernedo Del Carpio, Paul Ferraro and Ben Meiselman
Additional contact information
Francisco Alpízar: Environment for Development Center, CATIE
María Bernedo Del Carpio: University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Nature Climate Change, 2019, vol. 9, issue 8, 587-591

Abstract: Abstract Encouraging adaptation to climate change is fundamentally about encouraging changes in human behaviour. To promote these changes, governments, non-profits and multilateral institutions have invested in a range of adaptation projects. Yet there is little empirical evidence about which project components are effective in changing human behaviour1,2. This lack of evidence is concerning, given that the failure of adaptation initiatives has been described as the global risk with the highest likelihood of occurring and with the largest negative impacts3. Here we report on a scholar–practitioner collaboration in which a simple one-day workshop delivering two ubiquitous components of adaptation projects4—capacity building and the dissemination of climate science—was randomly assigned among the management councils of over 200 community water systems in an arid region of Central America. The workshop was based on more than three years of scientific research and local collaborations, and it aimed to convey downscaled climate modelling and locally informed, expert-recommended adaptation practices. Two years later, we detect no differences in pricing and non-pricing management practices of participant versus non-participant councils. These results suggest weaknesses in the common practice of using simple workshops for delivering capacity building and climate science.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0536-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:9:y:2019:i:8:d:10.1038_s41558-019-0536-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-019-0536-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().