Environmental change across Africa is happening at an alarming rate. In response to climate and associated environmental crises, the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa is expanding its research focus and engagement to apply our expertise on climate change and the environment. Through research collaborations, workshops, public events and blogs LSE is connecting with partners and building interdisciplinary expertise on the climate crisis in Africa.
In 2021, the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and the Global Development Hub at Imperial College London launched a new collaboration to encourage the vital multi-disciplinary work needed to address global challenges relating to environmental change, sustainability and inclusive and equitable transitions. The collaboration aims to develop novel research proposals to create a hub accessible to academics, policymakers and the public.
The collaboration develops joint funding proposals, creates a platform between the social and natural sciences and creates a network of researchers working on the effects of the climate crisis in Africa.
Climate resilience
As part of the Rockefeller Research and Impact Fund, FLIA conducted research on resilience: How people, communities and systems are prepared to withstand catastrophic events – both natural and manmade – and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger.
In particular, between 2017 and 2020 the Evaluating the Resilience Impact of Climate Insurance at the Grantham Research Institute worked alongside the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative and in contact with the G7 InsuResilience to develop demand-led resilience metrics that can be used for evaluation of insurance schemes. An important part of this work was focused on the added value of subjective approaches to resilience assessment, alongside the more traditional objective measures. The project was specifically interested in the added value that subjective measures of resilience can bring to our existing understanding of resilience, its relationship to well-being and our ability to monitor changes in resilience in response to insurance interventions at the micro-level.
As part of the same project, Universities as knowledge brokers in the governance of climate resilience critically examined the actual and potential role of universities as ‘knowledge brokers’ in the production, use and translation of knowledge among different actors currently involved in climate resilience.
Environmental management
Due to climate change elephants are increasingly looking for food and water outside of the borders of the Kidepo Valley National Park and people are increasingly facing violence inflicted upon them by a growing elephant population. In the region, many people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and increasingly elephants destroy crops at a consumable stage, leaving people with nothing to harvest – and in total despair. CPAID researchers looked at the relationship between humans and elephants and how the violence can affect future conservation efforts.
A project on water governance in Goma examined households’ daily management, financial governance, access to water and other basic social services in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It used an innovative mix of social network research, ethnography and governance diaries to gain in-depth data to reveal how residents navigate public authority in an insecure environment and cope with unforeseen shocks using data collected every two weeks by five Congolese researchers over a period of eleven months.
Carbon policies
As part of FLIA’s work on trade, Professor David Luke has conducted extensive research into the impact of potential carbon tariffs on imports to the UK and EU from Africa. The work looked at how such carbon policies could be implemented without restricting trade or being discriminatory. The work resulted in an in-depth report and a submission to the UK parliament.