CLARS

The “Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategies (CLARS): Socio-Economic Vulnerabilities among Urban Migrants in the Lake Victoria Basin and Great Lakes Region” project is an international consortium of universities and research institutes, funded via the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF, Canada). The German team is sponsored directly by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). CLARS aims to explore, design, and recommend co-produced adaptation strategies for reducing socioeconomic vulnerabilities (SEVs) and building resilience for vulnerable climate migrants and host communities across five Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) and Great Lakes Region (GLR) urban cities of Kampala, Mwanza, Eldoret, Detroit, and Hamilton. Bringing together eight partners from seven countries, CLARS will run for three years (June 2024 - May 2027). In the PIK Futurelab: Social Metabolism and Impacts, the research team contributes to the project in distinct ways: leading Work Package 4 (short title: “Climate and cultural values”), which employs a mix of participatory and longitudinal qualitative research methods focusing on key cases in Tanzania; co-leading Work Package 8 (short title: “Strategic Policy Recommendations”), which aims at mapping, developing, and co-producing strategic legal and policy recommendations. The project also involves cross-consortium activities that all partners contribute to and mainstream into all phases of research. A key innovation of CLARS lies in its South-North knowledge exchange. It uses mixed-method, interdisciplinary approaches involving participants from both lakes regions to generate detailed locally co-produced knowledge and data. This supports the development of climate adaptation and resilience strategies and policies that improve migrants and host citizens’ socioeconomic vulnerabilities for national governments, cities, and multilateral organizations.