Welcome to Adaptive
The Climate Change Exchange’s newsletter.
The Climate Change Exchange is back.
The Climate Change Exchange exists to bring together research, policy and practice to build our cross-sectoral capacity to create inclusive, just and transformative adaptation futures.
The Climate Change Exchange’s vision is of a boundary-crossing professional community sharing ideas and information to inspire courageous action that creates lasting positive change for people and planet.
Why should we care?
The core issue: We are facing a lack of connection between sectors, people and ideas which hampers our collective capacity to effectively adapt to climate change.
The risks we face: Our excessive pressures on the Earth’s natural systems are creating an imbalance that is worsening climate change and its effects on human and natural systems. These effects are experienced unevenly across communities and our ability to anticipate and reduce the negative impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly urgent.
What’s needed: We must find effective, integrated and socially equitable ways to adapt and address the drivers of climate risk and vulnerability to enable climate just responses.
This requires building adaptive capacity across all sectors and enabling policy makers, practitioners, community service organisations and funders to make effective decisions in the face of growing risk and uncertainty. This need must be recognised at a systems level and embedded into all areas of our lives and work to provide the space for researchers, policy makers and practitioners to learn from and understand each other’s perspectives and experiences.
Our response:
We build cross-sectoral capacity, informed by theory, practice and lived experience, to strategically address the drivers of risk and vulnerability to climate change. We support rigorous and reflective collaboration among researchers, policy makers, practitioners and communities to help inform better policies, practices and decision making. We create spaces for sharing, learning and connecting to build relationships, encourage critical thinking, challenge perspectives and enable collective and individual actions to transform systems.
We do this by:
Identifying intersectional and cross-sectoral issues to help guide strategic policy and practice on climate action.
Building community and organisational capacity through sharing resources to support just climate change adaptation in all its complexity.
Encouraging inclusive approaches that respect First Nations knowledges and diverse ways of learning, reflecting local understanding of climate change adaptation.
We focus on:
Strengthening the capability of organisations and communities to plan for, manage and recover from the impacts of climate change.
Increasing the use of relevant research to inform just adaptation planning.
Building a collaborative network of researchers and practitioners to share and promote innovative thinking and good practice in climate change adaptation.
We know that meaningful change through research and collaborations with real-world impact are not born in one day. They take time, understanding of the issues and their context, and spaces for people with diverse perspectives to connect again and again, to grow their understanding and act together to transform systems. The ambition of the Climate Change Exchange is to support and co-design applied climate adaptation learning that supports better decision making in a changing environment.
Gatherings
We organise gatherings that bring together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working on climate adaptation and justice. These spaces foster connection, allowing participants to share their work, exchange ideas, and learn from one another.
Workshops
We run workshops in practices and methods in adaptation and scenario planning, adaptation pathways and anticipatory policymaking, to build our capacity to navigate uncertainty. Although Greater Melbourne-based, we connect with both the Victorian and national policy landscapes and draw from international best-practice.
Applied research
We coordinate and amplify place-based climate adaptation research that showcases what it means to bridge the knowledge-action gap and progress just adaptation.
Website
The Climate Change Exchange website serves as a repository of trusted resources that help build the case for just climate change adaptation and as a digital portal connecting to the work.
Newsletter
This newsletter provides access to curated content that builds capacity, avoids duplication of efforts and supports impactful climate change adaptation research, policy and practice.
Want to be part of growing the shared understanding and practice of just adaptation, and together find effective ways to adapt and care for our future?