Spring 2023

February 22, 2023

IDCE Faculty & Staff Issue 6

Recognitions
Cindy Caron
Elected to board of Land Portal Foundation..

Cindy has been elected to the board of the Land Portal

Foundation. Her three-year term starts in March 2023.
Cindy Caron

As a board member, she hopes to find ways to

collaborate with and increase university partnerships.

https://landportal.org

Linking open data for land rights | Land Portal

Land Portal | Securing Land Rights Through Open Data
landportal.org Ed Carr

Land Portal Welcomes Dr. Cynthia

Caron and Dr. Richard Baldwin to Board
of Directors, Bids Farewell to Chair
Timothy Fella and Dr. Ritu Verma

The Land Portal Foundation is pleased to welcome Sharon Hanna

Dr. Cynthia Caron and Dr. Richard Baldwin to our
Board of Directors for a three-year term. We thank
our departing board members, chair Timothy Fella
and Dr. Ritu Verma, for their longstanding Inside this issue
commitment to and support of the Land Portal. They Cindy Caron ......................... 1
helped guide the Land Portal through major growth Ed Carr ................................. 2
and transition during the last six years, and their Sharon Hanna ...................... 2
counsel has been invaluable in shaping our work.
Dr. Elizabeth Daley, current secretary of the board,
will assume the chairship.
landportal.org

1
Ed Carr
Two publications...

Carr, Edward R., and Johanna Nalau. “Adaptation Rationales and Benefits: A Foundation for
Understanding Adaptation Impact.” Climate Risk Management 39 (2023): 100479.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2023.100479.

Abstract
Efforts to achieve coordinated, effective, and impactful
adaptation outcomes are complicated by factors rang-
ing from the local specificity of adaptation needs to the
challenges of politics and prioritization that drive fund-
ing decisions. However, these and other challenges are
perpetuated and exacerbated by poorly constructed,
often implicit, and generally institution- or context-
specific impact pathways connecting policy/
institutional priorities through their materialization in
specific actions to their intended outcomes. We call
these impact pathways adaptation rationales, as they
represent the logic of an adaptation action. The implicit
nature of most current adaptation rationales makes it
difficult to identify and test the accuracy and veracity
of claims and assumptions underlying everything from
policy priorities to intervention selection. In this article,
we address this foundational challenge for the adapta-
tion community of practice by proposing a typology of
adaptation benefits (reduced exposure, reduced sensi-
tivity, and increased adaptive capacity) that facilitates
the construction of meaningful, transparent adaptation
rationales. We lay out what these well-understood
components of vulnerability mean in the context of
adaptation benefits and provide guiding questions for
their use in constructing adaptation rationales. Using
hypothetical and real-world examples of projects and
portfolios, we illustrate how this typology and the ad-
aptation rationales it enables focus attention on the
goals of a given action, its likely effectiveness, and for
whom it is likely to be effective. Each of these issues
offers an opportunity to strengthen project design, im-
plementation, monitoring, and evaluation, while also
facilitating portfolio-level understandings of adaptation
approaches, assumptions, and efficacy. This typology
does not, by itself, presume to resolve the many de-
bates in adaptation practice, such as the tension be-
tween incremental and transformational goals, the
tradeoffs between actions addressing exposure via in-
frastructure versus those aimed at the underlying
structures of inequality that render some populations
more vulnerable to these impacts than others. Howev-
er, by bringing issues of governance and justice the
forefront of adaptation conversations, the typology,
and the adaptation rationales it enables, allows for the
productive, situationally-appropriate negotiation of
these debates to improve the outcomes of adaptation
policy and action.

List, Geneva, Ed Carr, Helen Rosko, Mario Machado, Sumita Chatterjee, Walter Baethgen, James Hansen, and Pam-
ela Jordan. Final Evaluation Report: Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday). New York, NY:
Columbia World Projects, 2022.

2
Sharon Hanna
Presenter...
Sharon was a presenter at Society for International Development’s (SID), pre-Career Fair Workshop, February 1.
SID-US (formerly SID-Washington), a US-based 501
(c)3, is the largest and most active chapter of
the Society for International Development (SID),
an international network founded in 1957 to serve
as a global forum dedicated to sustainable eco-
nomic, social and political development. Through
the locally-driven programs of our member organi-
zations and individuals, the majority of whom
work on the front lines of development, we are
uniquely positioned to inform and promote more
inclusive, equitable, and sustainable international
development. Our network includes chapters and
individual members in more than 50 countries.
The Secretariat has offices in Dar es-Salaam
(Tanzania), Nairobi (Kenya), and Rome (Italy).