Research Institute

We facilitate tailored dialogues with scientists, practitioners, and other leaders within government, international development organisations, and civil society on sticky environmental issues and the pathways to a climate-resilient future. The exchange allows us to study the scaling-up opportunities behind the ongoing emergence of a new climate regime, determine the direction and speed of proposed actions, promote the legitimacy of governance solutions, manage resistance towards transitions by yielding insights into the desirability of policy outcomes, and stress the significance of differentiating and distributing responsibility for sustainability governance beyond national governments.

We offer short courses in the science and practice of resilience thinking and managing environmental and social performance. The trainings have clear implications for enhancing environmental practice, policy, and research, and place a clear focus on the learner’s perspective and experience. They are grounded in everyday practice with rich, detailed case studies on the latest issues and debates surrounding global environmental change, sustainability, and resilience; the core concepts and frameworks of environmental and social performance; and the suite of best practices, methods, and procedures that apply to a wide range of environmental and social assessments.

We provide mentoring and scaling support to national NGOs and CBOs who qualify through an annual STA Challenge that requires the submission of a concept note on a bold and innovative climate resilience idea or initiative. Mentees join a training programme that supports them in a range of learning-by-doing and doing-by-learning activities that focus on 1) developing new knowledge; 2) diffusing, disseminating, and up-scaling innovative ideas, practices, and experiments; 3) creating a ‘conceptual space’ where prevalent perspectives, norms, values, and institutions can be changed; and 4) enhancing joint problem-solving.

We provide an independent and rigorous analysis of climate actions by public and private actors around the country and the sub-region to evaluate progress towards meeting local and regional commitments for adaptation, mitigation, loss and damage, and finance. The analysis is used to enhance governance decision-making by identifying and disseminating lessons and best practices, enriching climate resilience dialogues, and providing cross-sectoral, cross-level, and transboundary insights into risks and opportunities for achieving long-term goals for climate-resilient development.

We use state-of-the art GIS tools and UAV systems to track changes in the structure and function of social-ecological systems and show the nature and extent of impacts on ecosystem services, trends in stewardship, and the Quality-of-Life (QoL) within dependent human environments more broadly. We identify, analyse, and visualise driving forces, pressures, impacts, and responses to determine trends in various indicators, and carry out an integrated assessment for a holistic determination of the state of the environment.

We undertake research projects that 1) map and analyse the impacts of anthropogenic activities and actions required for building resilience in socio-ecological systems; 2) focus on new relations and roles within socio-institutional systems to understand processes of learning and doing as ways to adapt, change, and transform existing dominant cultures, structures, and practices; and 3) examine solutions to the challenges we face from climate change impacts on water, energy, agri-food, and sanitation systems, as well as the dynamics causing such risks and vulnerabilities.