Envisioning the future

Looking through that peephole where the future seems dark and bleak conjures up discomfort. We would all rather envision a better, happier tomorrow but anticipating a possible bleak future is crucial for communities to plan in the context of changes, says Dr. Petra Tschakert, Professor of Geography at Pennsylvania State University, USA.

This unique attempt to ‘envision’ climate change is called ‘Community-based Envisioning and Flexible Flood Management Planning with Field Validation’ and is part of an ongoing research on ‘Building adaptive capacity through collective learning and flexible planning in the Eastern Brahmaputra River Basin, India’ by Aaranyak, a Guwahati-based NGO working in the field of biodiversity conservation in Northeast India, together with Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and Oslo-based Centre for International Climate and Environment Research (CICERO).

The envisioning is a participatory research method employed to anticipate the possible future as the communities can see, in the context of climate change.

Petra was the main instructor at this training in Lakhimpur, Assam where people from the communities along with participants from different organisations such as ICIMOD, CICERO, Aaranyak and District Disaster Management Authority of Dhemaji and Lakhimpur districts of Assam came together for the exercise.

“Flooding is part of the norm in monsoons. Then, one would wonder why work on flooding if it is so part of the lives. The reason is simple. Climate change studies predict that floods in Assam, in general India and in other places is most likely to become more frequent and more severe in the next 40-50 years. This exercise tries to better prepare people in these rural communities who are exposed to climatic changes in future including more frequent and intense rainfall events that would result in flooding. The idea is to better understand not just adaptation but to build adaptive capacity of communities exposed to climate change”, she commented.

Assam has a long history of tradition of flood management, but those are primarily in terms of structural interventions, including embankments. While it is no secret that embankments have failed and disappointed people very often, this exercise proposes something called anticipatory learning- to learn about the future even though we can’t really predict it.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Once you have paid attention to current trends, say you know that the highest siltation is in the month of September, you then can prepare better for it. Again, if you see that the siltation is twice as much territory as the year before, what does that mean for 20 years from now for the communities, if the trend continues? What does that mean if the rainfall events and flooding gets twice as frequent or twice as severe and what does that do to sandcasting or siltation? So the tendency to keep track of changes by just observing and taking measurement allows people to better extract these trends into the future.

Step 3:

“That does not mean however, that the entire responsibility is on people’s shoulders rather it just means that people are assured they have the agency to undertake measures, to prepare, to take their plans to the district level on the basis of the data and trends they have. It is a way to give people the power to undertake action themselves and when they cannot anymore, to go with a substantial amount of evidence to the district for assistance”, Petra remarked.