How can we better understand and manage the impacts of droughts?

This work was carried out under the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), with financial support from the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DfID) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.The impact of drought on the lives of subsistence crop and livestock farmers in semi-arid northern Namibia extends beyond hunger and exacerbated poverty levels. Current development interventions often fail to address the underlying causes of people’s vulnerability and make it difficult for adaptation to be successful due to their narrow view around addressing vulnerability. A wellbeing approach has the potential to offer a different, people-centred way of informing climate change adaptation because it explicitly integrates people’s aspirations (e.g. achieving food security) and values (e.g. freedom or a good quality of life)