Adaptation & Resilience to Climate Change (ARCC)

General

In this 3-year project, we aim understand how societies, landscapes, ecosystems and Protected Areas have responded to climate change and societal use, to better understand how they may respond in the future. To do this, we will focus on the temporality, spatiality & complexity of interactions and interdependencies of social-ecological systems in north-western Tanzania over the last 300 years. Local livelihoods range from intensive agriculture to livestock herding & hunting-and-gathering, coupled with employment in tourism, conservation, or mineral extraction. Pressures from global climate change, rapid population growth, competing land use (including wildlife conservation), and new 'governmental' regimes pose major threats to livelihoods, their sustainability & resilience to future socio-ecological shocks. We will use a cross-disciplinary approach integrating archaeological, environmental, archival, modern land use & remote sensing data, with collaborative modelling of future land use & land cover change scenarios, to identify past and possible future drivers of change & sources of resilience; generate guidelines for land use planning; build research capacities in Sweden (post-doctoral position) & Tanzania (collaborating researcher) in sustainability studies; strengthen community awareness of and engagement in these issues. Hosted by Uppsala University, the team will involve experienced & junior researchers from Sweden, Tanzania & the UK.