Research and Advocacy for Climate Policy and Action (RACPA) is a five-year project designed to better understand the climate change and human (im)mobility nexus in the context of coastal and island communities. Through advocacy efforts geared toward government and other duty-bearers and actorsthat are informed by this improved understanding, it hopes to pave theway for more responsive policies that would help coastal and island communities increase their climate resilience.
The project, supported by theAustralian Government throughCaritas Australia, takes as itsstarting point three communities inIndonesia and the Philippines, twoarchipelagic countries in Southeast Asia that are deemed among themost vulnerable to the adverseimpacts of climate change.
The first year of the project, fromJuly 2023 to June 2024, focused ongauging and deepening community understanding ofclimate change and displacement. Through participatory actionresearch, evidence based on livedexperience was gathered using ahousehold survey and community mapping, and complemented withkey informant interviews with technical and policy experts. A consortium comprised of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Asia Pacific, Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC), and the Institute for Social Research, Democracy and Social Justice (Percik Institute) accompanied the community research teams through out there search process, beginning from preparatory training to data gathering, to results analysis, all theway to the presentation of findings to key stakeholders. This regional report summarizes theinitial results of these research activities, as well as of interviewsand dialogues conducted by ESSC and Percik with key stakeholders from the national and local government, civil society, and theacademe.Insights from the findings will bevalidated and enriched through further research by the consortiumin Year 2 of the project, using interviews, focus group discussions and multi-stakeholder forums. They will also underpin further community empowerment activities, including the preparation of community adaptation plans and implementation of small-scalecommunity resilience projects.
