Anglophone African regional writeshop to support developing country publications on disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change

The writeshop will involve one-on-one work with mentors to provide supplemental training on academic writing and argumentation, in order to help new authors reach a standard of writing suitable for publication in peerreviewed journals. Sixteen participants will be selected.

The writeshop is one of two that will be held in Africa in 2011, and will be run in English. The second writeshop, scheduled for a later date in 2011, will be run in French. French-speakers are encouraged to apply to the second writeshop, unless the candidate's English is absolutely fluent and he/she would prefer to work and write in English.

The writeshop will address topics that are relevant to climate change adaptation and the 2011 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR). Papers selected for the writeshop can therefore focus on any of the following themes, but are not limited to them:

Enabling Environments

- How can policies in trade and productive sector development increase resilience and adaptive capacity, particularly for small and vulnerable economies, such as SIDS and land-locked countries?
- How can trade and productive sector development policies increase these countries’ resilience to disasters and the harmful impacts of climate change?
- How can existing social assistance and poverty alleviation programmes be improved to increase communities’ resilience to disaster loss?
- How can employment policy and programmes, such as rural employment guarantee programmes, increase communities’ resilience to disaster loss?
- What are the mechanisms and enabling conditions that allow innovative practices at the community and local levels to be scaled up to district and national level implementation?
- How can investment of large quantities of adaptation and risk reduction funding respond to local needs and mobilizes local resources?

Governance

- How do decentralisation processes empower local and city governments and facilitate local risk reduction and community-based adaptation?
- How can innovative institutional and legislative arrangements for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation can facilitate implementation? How have some governments succeeded in integrating the arrangements for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and in moving the centre of gravity from traditional emergency management organizations to central ministries for planning and finance, including the integration of risk reduction into national development plans and budgets?
- How have risk reduction considerations been incorporated into planning and regulation, for example using cost-benefit analysis? What regulatory frameworks (e.g., building codes and land use planning policies) have been used and how effective have they been at reducing disaster risk?
- How have market-based mechanisms, such as parametric insurance, catastrophe bonds, micro-finance and others increased resilience and adaptive capacity at the national, local and household levels? How have risk-reduction incentives been successfully integrated into market-based mechanisms? What are the practical steps and economic and social considerations required to develop targeted and transparent instruments? What institutional and governance arrangements required?

Ecosystem services

- What are the benefits of different approaches to managing, enhancing, protecting and restoring ecosystem services as a strategy for reducing disaster risk and strengthening adaptive capacity? Where have these approaches been employed most effectively? And what are the factors (political, economic, regulatory, etc.) that allow for these approaches to be implemented?