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A changing climate brings with it new challenges for communities in developing countries, and for the institutions and people working to deliver assistance within those communities.

Complicating matters, these challenges will affect communities differently, depending on their vulnerability and adaptive capacity.

To address these new challenges, the natural and social communities will need to work together to integrate program agendas, strategies, and indicators. This was the message of February's Video Science Seminar, co-organised by CCAFS, the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) and the University of Copenhagen, available now for you to watch online.

But how do you integrate resilience and development agendas, strategies and indicators; and what's more, how do you address social differentiation, vulnerability and risk, whilst building adaptive capacity? In other words, after recognizing the need, how do you address the social aspects of climate change? 

As a start, Ian Christoplos, a Senior Researcher at DIIS, called on development agencies to start setting concrete resilience indicators during program planning, and to measure against those indicators during program evaluation. 'Resilience' he said, 'has entered the discourse largely as a catch-word for the time-being.' While acknowledging that such indicators are complex, dynamic, uncertain, and need to account for varying levels of vulnerability and risk, Ian called on the development community not to take a defeatist attitude: 'we can't be pessimistic', he said, 'because if we are, we are never going to get this on the agenda.'

Watch the presentation:

Following Ian, Heide Hackmann, Executive Director of the International Social Science Council (ISSC), called on the social science community to embrace climate change issues as fundamental social science issues. Presenting a summary of her co-authored paper The Transformative Cornerstones of Social Science Research, Heide identified six key question areas where the social sciences could help unpack the social dimensions of climate change, from understanding the historical and contextual complexities of climate change, to identifying and unpacking the impact of climate change, the conditions and visions for change, the nature and role of interpretation and subjective sense making, issues around responsibility, and also governance.

During the final presentation of the seminar, Arame Tall, a CCAFS Climate Services Scientist, called on development agencies to address equity challenges by integrating participatory action research into program development. Using a case study from the field, she showed how a participatory approach could lead to more equitable results, and help deliver program objectives. 'The most critical thing to do is to find ways to include equity from the word go' said Arame, stressing the need to set specific targets around women and other vulnerable groups.

View Arame Tall's presentation:

The three presentations were followed by a panel discussion moderated by Stig Jensen, Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Putting integration into action, the panel brought members of the development, social and environmental science communities together, including Asuncion Lera St. Clair, Research Director, CICERO-Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Norway; Odd Flemming, Policy Director for the Department of Climate Change, Energy and Environment in Norway, and Flemming Winther Olsen, Senior Technical Adviser in the Environment, Natural Resources and Food Security team in the Green Growth office in Denmark.

Seeking to answer the question, what needs to happen to bring the diverse effects of climate change on people into focus, the panel discussed the changes that are taking place and that need to take place.

Some challenging questions were posed regarding the sufficiency with which rights and resilience have been integrated into development programs and policy. If it is hard to develop indicators that measure resilience, it is even harder to develop indicators that measure resilience in relation to rights. Further questions were raised challenging the integration of knowledge and action, as well as the success of integrating knowledge from various fields.

Again and again, the discussion turned to integration: 'we need complex interaction between and across the disciplines' said Asuncion St. Clair. We need projects that bring together stakeholders from the private sector, the public sector, as well as pastoralists from the field, echoed Flemming Winther Olsen, and we need projects that integrate local, small-scale approaches with global objectives, said Odd Flemming.

The challenges that we face on the road to integration were then taken up in a forty-minute open discussion session, during which the live and online audience had a chance to ask questions.

The whole seminar can now be viewed online through the CCAFS Videostream page, where you can also sign up to be notified of any upcoming video seminars that CCAFS is organising.

Find past seminars here.

Lucy Holt is a Communications Assistant at CCAFS Coordinating Unit. If you would like to read more about CCAFS research on gender and social differentiation, click here. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest updates.