This thesis examines the interplay between the effects of climate change and human rights. It seeks to interrogate the contribution of human rights in addressing the effects of climate change on the enjoyment of the right to food in Kenya. Climate change has been recognised as a human rights issue. Despite this acknowledgement, many states are yet to deal with climate change as a growing threat to the realisation of human rights. The situation is made worse by the glacial pace in securing a binding legal agreement to tackle climate change. The thesis also reveals that despite their seemingly disparate and disconnected nature, both the human rights and climate change regimes seek to achieve the same goal albeit in different ways. The thesis argues that a considerable portion of the Kenyan population has not been able to enjoy the right to food as a result of droughts and floods. It adopts the view that, with the effects of climate change being evident, the frequency and magnitude of droughts and floods has increased with far reaching consequences on the right to food. Measures by the Kenyan government to address the food situation have always been knee jerk and inadequate in nature. This is despite the fact that Kenya is a signatory to a number of human rights instruments that deal with the right to food. With the promulgation of a new Constitution with a justiciable right to food, there is a need for the Kenyan government to meet its human rights obligations. This thesis concludes by suggesting ways in which the right to food can be applied in order to address some of the effects of climate change. It argues that by adopting a human rights approach to the right to food, the State will have to adopt measures that take into consideration the impacts of climate change. Furthermore, the State is under an obligation to engage in activities that will not contribute to climate change and negatively affect the right.

Assessing and managing risks posed by climate variability and change is challenging in the tropics, from both a scientific and a socio-economic perspective. While our understanding of the tropical land rainfall variability and its future projection is highly uncertain, most of the vulnerable countries with a limited adaptation capability are within the tropical band. This dissertation combines a process-based physical understanding with observational analysis to characterize the spatio-temporal changes in the tropical land rainfall during a transient El Niño evolution, with an emphasis on the risk management of the dry and wet extremes. The broad objectives are two-fold: 1) To make better sense of the higher uncertainty in the tropical rainfall response to warming and 2) to improve climate risk management strategies in the tropical developing countries. An ENSO teleconnection mechanism, referred to as the tropical tropospheric temperature or TTT mechanism provides a theoretical framework to study the remote tropical land rainfall behavior during a transient El Niño warming. The TTT mechanism postulates that the tropic-wide free tropospheric warming interacts locally with the deep convection to modulate remote tropical climate. During the growth phase, anomalous free tropospheric temperature causes direct and fast atmospheric adjustments leading to tropospheric stability to deep moist convection and a drier response. Subsequently, during mature phase, a recovery of the initial rainfall deficit follows due to indirect and slower adjustments in surface temperature and humidity fields. In chapter 2 and 3 of this dissertation, the changes in the observed tropical land rainfall characteristics and other climate fields conditional on the growth and mature phase of El Niño warming are investigated and the role of dynamical and thermodynamic mechanisms as hypothesized by the TTT mechanism are elucidated. In chapter 4, an El Niño forecast based early action investment strategy is developed to reduce the socio-economic impacts of rainfall extremes at sub-seasonal to inter-annual lead time scales. In the part I (chapter 2), the analysis is conducted at a regional scale over the tropical Africa. Using the TTT mechanism, a physical explanation is provided for the contrasting rainfall response over the Western Sahel and tropical Eastern Africa during an El Niño. The study finds that the Western Sahel’s main rainy season (July-September) is affected by the growth phase of El Niño through (i) a lack of neighboring North Atlantic sea surface warming, (ii) an absence of an atmospheric column water vapor anomaly over the North Atlantic and Western Sahel, and (iii) higher atmospheric vertical stability over the Western Sahel, resulting in the suppression of mean seasonal rainfall as well as number of wet days. In contrast, the short rainy season (October-December) of tropical Eastern Africa is impacted by the mature phase of El Niño through (i) neighboring Indian Ocean sea surface warming, (ii) positive column water vapor anomalies over the Indian Ocean and tropical Eastern Africa, and (iii) higher atmospheric vertical instability over tropical Eastern Africa, leading to an increase in mean seasonal rainfall as well as in the number of wet days. While the modulation of the frequency of wet days and seasonal mean accumulation is statistically significant, daily rainfall intensity (for days with rainfall >1 mm/day), whether mean, median, or extreme, does not show a significant response in either region. Hence, the variability in seasonal mean rainfall that can be attributed to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation phenomenon in both regions is likely due to changes in the frequency of rainfall. These observed changes agree with the predictions of the TTT mechanism. In the part II (chapter 3), a global scale analysis is performed to more generally characterize the spatio-temporal differences in remote tropical land rainfall response to El Niño warming. The principal conclusions are: 1) during the El Niño growth phase relative to the neutral phase, rainfall decreases. A significant decrease in mean accumulation can be attributed to a significant increase in proportion of dry days and decrease in median and extreme intensity. A significant descent anomaly confirms the vertical stabilization and dominance of dynamical processes. 2) During the mature phase relative to the growth phase, rainfall increases, signifying a recovery from the suppression of deep moist convection. A significant increase in mean accumulation is accompanied by a decrease in proportion of dry days and by an increase in median and extreme intensity characteristics. The significant rise in the moisture field corroborates the dominance of thermodynamic processes. These findings are expected from the TTT mechanism and generalizes the findings of part I to the global scale. In the part III (chapter 4), an El Niño forecast based index insurance policy is developed that can be used as an early action investment instrument. The forecast insurance (FI) design framework is illustrated with an application to El Niño associated flood hazard during the January-February-March-April (JFMA) season over Piura region of Peru. In order to determine the economic utility of the system, a simple cost-loss decision model, incorporating the insurance cost, is developed. The main conclusion is that the proposed El Niño forecast insurance policy with the pre-event Niño1.2 index based trigger has significant reliability and substantial utility for a wide range of policy parameters considered. Relative to a no early action strategy, the advantage of the system generally increases with i) shortening in the lead time from 9 to 1 month, ii) increase in El Niño severity level from 10 to 50 year return period and iii) increase in avoidable loss to cost ratio (LCR) ratio from 1 to 1000. These results and the forecast insurance modeling and utility evaluation frameworks have implications for designing optimal contingent financial instruments for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

Over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, works of art explored social isolation, abolition, and climate crisis. The pandemic had ruptured normative curricular practices in schools and learning discourses focused on minimizing those interruptions. Meanwhile, works such as Ellen Reid’s SOUNDWALK, Kamau Ware’s Fighting Dark, and Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest crafted relationships to knowledge through site-specific sounds, familiar materials, and sensory experiences of their environments. A group of curriculum designers, researchers, and educators, including the author of this study, affiliated with a university-based Curriculum Lab engaged with these artworks, while processing the pandemic’s effects on their own curricular practices. Situated within the Lab, this project used ethnographic and speculative methods to research how the artworks’ aesthetic and sensory strategies activated curricular contact zones and contributed to artful practices for curriculum theory and design. This study built on the work of critical curriculum scholarship which has demonstrated that significant forms of knowledge and belonging are produced through informal and null curriculum, and outside of schools entirely. Drawing on aesthetics, affect, and vital materialisms, this study theorized ambient curriculum: a surround through which any variety of onto-epistemological practices might cohere into relationships of knowing and becoming. At the same time, this study recognized that formal curriculum exerts a large influence on the daily lives of teachers and students, and that there are educators searching for forms of curriculum more aligned to their commitments to social and ecological justice; beliefs about the complexity of knowledge and learning; and approach to design as a creative process. This project considers the implications of such creative processes for curriculum design as a nomadic practice and curriculum designers as nomadic becomings, making and made by their creations.

Climate change has emerged as one of the most significant issues facing the world. This research endeavored to uncover and describe the lived experience of Portland, Oregon residents in relation to the substantive issue of climate change. The specific purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of the ways that Portland residents conceive of and communicate about climate change. Utilizing semi-structured phenomenological interviews, particular attention was paid to the culture of Portland residents, their lived experience and how the issue of climate change manifests itself in their everyday experiences. In addition, this particular phenomenological inquiry incorporated elements of auto ethnography by positioning the researcher`s experiences, imagination and intellect at the center of the research endeavor. Multiple themes emerged from the in-depth, descriptive interviews that helped to reveal the structure or essence of the participant`s experience(s). A single meta-theme was identified and informed by contemporary theories such as Cosmopolitanism and the Environmental Justice Paradigm.

Text in English / Climate change has become part of daily conversations for scholars and activists. Everyone feels entitled to an opinion on either the causes or the prescriptions of mitigation measures. Very few question the ontological existence of climate change or wonder whether their perceptions are pre-empted by over-arching metanarratives or discourses articulated elsewhere. The impact of media and other sources of information on people’s perceptions of climate change are often taken for granted. By using discourse theory, this study aims to uncover taken-for-granted metanarratives within environmentally oriented university Honours student’s perceptions of climate change. These students are majoring in the key areas of Environmental Management studies. It aims at assessing whether their perceptions are, consciously or inadvertently, mis (aligned) to any climate change discourses. In discourse theory, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argued that within a particular knowledge domain, there are several meaning-conferring articulations (discourses) in a struggle of fixing meaning for particular social events and activities. As such, each discourse aims at negating alternative meanings from alternative discourses and naturalising its own interpretations. Within a particular discourse, actors (individuals or groups) are interpellated i.e. defined within specific confines of action and articulations. This study uses this discourse theory to test these hypotheses. As such, the study came up with three conclusions. First, there is a metanarrative of climate change realism, in which the ontological reality of climate change is taken as a given, with no attempt at individual reflection on its ontology. Secondly, the respondents held a mediated concept of climate change, in which their views largely mirror the conceptualisations of the media and other information sources. Lastly, there is an overarching climate-change aversion metanarrative, in which climate change is regarded as negative, without any distinction between its causes and effects. / Development Studies / M.A. (Development Studies)

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May, 2015. / There is sufficient evidence supporting that climate change and variability are pervasive realities that are strongly impacting on smallholder farmers in the Great Ruaha River sub-Basin of Tanzania. This PhD study examines smallholder farmers’ vulnerability, coping and adaptation strategies to climate change and variability (including non-climatic stresses), and investigates how such coping and adaptation may be constrained or enhanced given climate variability and change. Both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were used when engaging with smallholder farmers and government officials. Primary data collection was undertaken in two phases, with phase one using participatory tools (e.g. focus group discussions, wealth ranking, community mapping and transect walk, and historical time lines). Data collected include climatic and non-climatic extreme events, farmers’ perceptions, coping and adaptation strategies. Phase two involved detailed individual interviews (questionnaire surveys) and key informant interviews (case studies), so as to obtain in-depth information on issues of interest. Secondary data were collected from existing statistical sources, literature surveys in archives, libraries and documentation centres, and from governmental agencies (e.g. TMA). Demographic, agricultural production and livestock statistics, and rainfall and temperature records were collected. Results from selected meteorological stations and farmers’ perceptions (74%) indicate that there has been an increase in average maximum temperatures, and both dry and wet years with varying magnitudes during the past four decades. Other climatic stresses include delayed onset and later cessation of the rain seasons. The agreement between farmers’ perceptions and rainfall trends provides good evidence that the climate has become increasingly variable in the GRRB during the past four decades. Achieving sustainable livelihoods is further compounded by non-climatic stresses such as access to markets and coordinating institutions. Results indicate that vulnerability is a complex phenomenon that entails two approaches (end-point and starting-point perspectives). The end-point perspective views vulnerability as the net projected climate change impacts after adaptation has taken place, whilst the starting-point perspective looks at both the current and future multiple stresses and places much emphasis in improving the adaptive capacity. In the study villages, such a nuanced picture highlighted areas for enhanced adaptation strategies. Farmers respond by using various strategies to deal with droughts, floods and other stresses when they occur. During droughts, they mostly use irrigation (canal, pumping and cans), or plant short-term maturing crops. During food shortages, farmers use strategies such as buying food, borrowing money, temporary migration, working in other people’s farms for cash, and reducing consumption. Moreover, the farmers’ choice of adaptation and coping strategies is influenced by factors such as location, access to resources, education levels and institutions. This calls for a whole system approach, which entails defining vulnerability of smallholder farmers to climatic and non-climatic stresses and thus designing appropriate response strategies. For example, mainstreaming adaptation to such stresses when considering development plans, projects, programmes and policies at all scales.

Text in English / Climate change has become part of daily conversations for scholars and activists. Everyone feels entitled to an opinion on either the causes or the prescriptions of mitigation measures. Very few question the ontological existence of climate change or wonder whether their perceptions are pre-empted by over-arching metanarratives or discourses articulated elsewhere. The impact of media and other sources of information on people’s perceptions of climate change are often taken for granted. By using discourse theory, this study aims to uncover taken-for-granted metanarratives within environmentally oriented university Honours student’s perceptions of climate change. These students are majoring in the key areas of Environmental Management studies. It aims at assessing whether their perceptions are, consciously or inadvertently, mis (aligned) to any climate change discourses. In discourse theory, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argued that within a particular knowledge domain, there are several meaning-conferring articulations (discourses) in a struggle of fixing meaning for particular social events and activities. As such, each discourse aims at negating alternative meanings from alternative discourses and naturalising its own interpretations. Within a particular discourse, actors (individuals or groups) are interpellated i.e. defined within specific confines of action and articulations. This study uses this discourse theory to test these hypotheses. As such, the study came up with three conclusions. First, there is a metanarrative of climate change realism, in which the ontological reality of climate change is taken as a given, with no attempt at individual reflection on its ontology. Secondly, the respondents held a mediated concept of climate change, in which their views largely mirror the conceptualisations of the media and other information sources. Lastly, there is an overarching climate-change aversion metanarrative, in which climate change is regarded as negative, without any distinction between its causes and effects. / Development Studies / M.A. (Development Studies)

Climate variability and change as well as sea level rise poses significant challenges to livelihoods, water and food security in small island developing states (SIDSs) including the Zanzibar Islands. Thus, without planned strategic adaptation, the future projected changes in climate and sea level will intensify the vulnerability of these sensitive areas. This thesis is based on research conducted in two sites located in the north eastern parts of each island, namely Kiuyu Mbuyuni, Pemba Island and Matemwe, Unguja Island. The research focused firstly on assessing the vulnerability of these two coastal communities to climate variability and change and other stressors. This included investigation of (1) the perceptions of fishers, farmers and seaweed farmers regarding climate stressors and shocks and associated risks and impacts, (2) existing and possible future water and food security issues, and (3) household's access to important livelihood assets. This was followed by an exploration of the coping and adaptive responses of farmers, fishers and seaweed farmers to perceived shocks and stresses and some of the barriers to these responses. Lastly, an analysis of the implications of the findings for achieving sustainable coastal livelihoods and a resilient coastal community was undertaken. The general picture that emerges is that local people along the east coasts of both islands are already vulnerable to a wide range of stressors. Although variability in rainfall is not a new phenomenon in these areas, increasing frequency of dry spells and coastal floods resulting from the influence of El Niño and La Niña events exert enormous pressures on local activities (fishing, farming and seaweed farming) which are the crux of the local economy. The main argument of the study is that the nature and characteristics of these activities are the main source of sensitivity amongst these communities and this creates high levels of vulnerability to climate shocks and trends. This vulnerability is evidenced by the reoccurrence of localised food shortages and the observed food and water insecurity. The study found that food insecurity is a result of unreliable rainfall, drought and seasonality changes. These interacted with other contextual factors such as poor soil, low purchasing power and the lack of livelihood diversification options. In addition to exposure to these almost unavoidable risks from climate variability, the vulnerability of the local communities along the east coasts is also influenced by the low level of capital stocks and limited access to the assets that are important for coping and adaptation. Despite this, some households managed to overcome barriers and adapt in various ways both within the three main livelihood sectors (fishing, farming and seaweed farming) as well as through adopting options outside these sectors resulting in diversification of the livelihood portfolio. However, the study found that most of the strategies opted for by fishers, farmers and seaweed farmers were mainly spontaneous. Few planned adaptation measures supported by state authorities were observed across the sites, with the exception of the provision of motorised boats which were specifically meant to increase physical assets amongst fishers, reduce pressure in the marine conservation areas and prevent overfishing in-shore. Furthermore, numerous strategies that people adopted were discontinued when further barriers were encountered. Interestingly, some of the barriers that prevented households adapting were the same ones that forced households that had responded to abandon their adaptations. To increase resilience amongst east coast communities to current and future predicted changes in climate and sea level, the study argues that traditional livelihood activities (fishing, farming and seaweed farming) need to be better supported, and access to a range of livelihood assets improved. This may be achieved through increased access to local sources of water and facilitation of rainwater harvesting, expanding the livelihood options available to people and increasing climate change awareness, and access to sources of credit.

The focus of this study is on understanding the multiple and interacting factors that hinder or enable municipal planned climate change adaptation, here called barriers and enablers respectively, and their implications for community based adaptation. To do this I developed a conceptual framework of barriers to and enablers of planned climate change adaptation, which informed a systematic literature review of barriers to planned community based adaptation in developing countries. In this framework barriers were grouped into resource, social and physical barriers. I then conducted empirical case study analysis using qualitative research methods in four South African municipalities to understand what barriers and enablers manifested in these contexts. In light of the reflexive nature of my methodology, my framework was adjusted based on my empirical findings, where contextual barriers were found to better represent the empirical results and subsumed physical barriers. I found my framework useful for analysis, but in the empirical cases, barriers and enablers overlaid and interacted so significantly that in reality it was often difficult to separate them. A key finding was that enablers tended to be more about the way things are done, as opposed to direct opposites of barriers. Comparison of barriers and enablers across the case studies revealed a number of key themes. Municipalities struggle to implement climate change adaptation and community based adaptation within contexts of significant social, economic and ecological challenges. These contextual barriers, when combined with certain cognitive barriers, lead to reactive responses. Existing municipal systems and structures make it difficult to enable climate change adaptation, which is inherently cross‐sectoral and messy, and especially community based adaptation that is bottom‐up and participatory. Lack of locally applicable knowledge, funding and human resources were found to be significant resource barriers, and were often underlain by social barriers relating to perceptions, norms, discourses and governance challenges. Enablers of engaged officials, operating within enabling organisational environments and drawing on partnerships and networks, were able to overcome or circumvent these barriers. When these enablers coincided with windows of opportunity that increased the prioritisation of climate change within the municipality, projects with ancillary benefits were often implemented. Analysis of the barriers and enablers identified in the literature and case studies, informed discussion on whether municipalities are able to implement community based adaptation as defined in the literature, as well as the development of recommendations for how municipal planned climate change adaptation and community based adaptation can be further understood and enabled in the future. These recommendations for practice and research include: (a) To acknowledge and understand the conceptual framings of municipal climate change work, as these framings inform the climate change agenda that is pursued, and hence what municipal climate change adaptation work is done and how it was done. (b) The need for further research into the social barriers that influence the vital enablers of engaged officials, enabling organisational environments, and partnerships and networks. (c) To learn from pilot community‐level interventions that have been implemented by municipalities, as well as from other disciplines and municipalities. (d) To develop top‐down/bottom‐up approaches to enable municipal planned climate change adaptation and community based adaptation, that benefits from high level support and guidance, as well as local level flexibility and learning‐by‐doing. (e) To develop viable mechanisms for municipalities to better engage with the communities they serve.