Capacity Strengthening

By Lucy Holt

This week’s conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Climate Justice had a mission to give a voice to the voiceless. To ensure that the people who are most vulnerable to climate change and the most marginalized from political processes are represented in the post-2015 development agenda. More than just words, the conference brought nearly a hundred grassroots practitioners to Dublin from Africa, Asia, Oceania and South America to tell their stories, share their experiences, listen and learn from each other, as well as ask questions and demand answers from decision makers in policy, research and aid organizations.

It also brought two World Vision Youth Ambassadors, Mr Alex Nallo and Mr. Salah Hussein, to address the conference on behalf of the most vulnerable and voiceless: the children of today and the unborn children of tomorrow, raising the complex and difficult issues associated with intergenerational climate justice. The two demanded that conference participants think further ahead than a post-2015 agenda and start thinking about a post-2050 agenda, delivering a strong message that 2015 is not the end-point but a chance for a new beginning. Read more »

Co-written by Irish Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore; Mary Robinson, president of the Mary Robinson Foundation Climate Justice; Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the World Food Programme; and Frank Rijsberman, CEO, CGIAR Consortium.

Join the discussion on Twitter: #HNCJ

"Imagine a world where too much rain, or too little, means the difference between a life fulfilled and a life blighted by hunger and poor nutrition.  Imagine, for a brief moment, measuring your children’s chance of survival by the number of bags of grain you harvest or against a dwindling stock of rice.

This is the reality for millions of vulnerable communities. Today, almost one billion people suffer from hunger, most of them women and children. Globally, almost one in three children grows up lacking the nutrients they need to fend off disease and to develop to their full potential. 

And now, climate change is exacerbating the hardships they face daily.  Read more »

by Floriane Clement

International climate change debates are often based upon simplistic assumptions of how men and women perceive and address risks and uncertainty. For instance, women are commonly portrayed as a homogenous group who are always more vulnerable than men to climate change simply because they are women. Yet the relationship between gender, poverty and vulnerability is neither straightforward, nor universal (Arora-Jonsson, 2011).

Just to illustrate, in some areas of Nepal it was found that poor women from landless households are more likely to attend community meetings and speak up because they feel less constrained by social norms than women from higher class and caste (Agarwal, 2010). They have therefore a higher capability to influence community decisions that might affect their vulnerability. Read more »