These were the fault lines explored at the RLRI Africa Program’s recent webinar, Rethinking Climate Adaptation in Africa, bringing together researchers and practitioners from Africa and Canada to interrogate why adaptation policy consistently misses the communities it targets.
Adaptation is Failing Because it is designed from the Wrong Place.
Drawing on field experience from Sierra Leone, Patricia Jitta Abdulai, Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Science at the University of Makeni in Sierra Leone, was direct: adaptation strategies fail because they are designed far from the communities they are meant to serve. Externally imposed programmes, one-size-fits-all interventions, and short project cycles reproduce vulnerability rather than reduce it. Women, who are disproportionately exposed to climate impacts and most directly engaged in agriculture, remain largely excluded from climate planning and financing decisions, a gap she described as both a governance failure and a missed opportunity.
Yet communities are not waiting. According to Abdulai, what she calls the no-wait-for-government adaptation approach is already at work across Sierra Leone: residents in Freetown’s informal settlements organise drainage-clearing mobilisations before the rainy season, farmers use indigenous crop indicators to anticipate rainfall variability, and community groups recycle plastic waste into usable materials. These, she stressed, are not informal workarounds but functional, cost-effective strategies that formal systems have failed to recognise or resource. Governments and donors must integrate these local actors into climate planning as a matter of policy, not goodwill.
In the Sahel, Climate Stress is a Pressure Multiplier
According to Bouchra Bargam, co-lead of the Baobab Synthesis Project at the University of Cape Town, climate change across the Sahel is not experienced as an isolated environmental issue; it interacts with livelihoods, governance, and community realities in cascading ways. Rainfall variability constrains water availability, undermines food security and pastoral livelihoods, intensifies displacement pressures, and deepens competition over land, accelerating conflict. Adaptation approaches that treat any one of these as a separate problem, she noted, are structurally set up to fail.
She was equally clear on inequality within the system: women, small-scale farmers, and pastoralist communities face the greatest exposure to climate impacts while remaining the most consistently excluded from governance processes meant to protect them. Effective adaptation, she concluded, must be anticipatory rather than reactive, locally grounded rather than centrally designed, and capable of holding the climate-livelihood-conflict nexus as a single policy challenge.
Misinformation is Eroding the Political Conditions for Adaptation
Andrew Heffernan, Senior Programs Manager at the Centre for Information Integrity, brought a dimension into the conversation that is rarely part of adaptation discussions but is quietly undermining progress on all other fronts: the state of public information. When societies are deeply divided, or when people no longer trust their institutions, climate policy cannot take hold. This, he emphasised, is not a side issue; it is a fundamental condition for any adaptation effort to succeed.
He pointed out that false climate narratives do not always arrive from the outside. They often travel through local networks and community channels until they feel homegrown, which makes them far more difficult to challenge. In places where livelihoods depend on fossil fuels, the idea that climate action is simply a Western attempt to hold Africa back can spread quickly, not because communities naturally believe it, but because it is being deliberately pushed by well-funded actors who know how to exploit real and legitimate frustrations about who caused the climate crisis in the first place. As more Africans come online, Heffernan warned, the tools being used to spread these narratives are becoming cheaper and more targeted.
The response, he emphasized, is not just to communicate more; it is to communicate differently. Telling communities about global emissions targets or international climate agreements does not land when people are focused on feeding their families today.
Three Policy Priorities
Three clear directions emerged across all three presentations. Governments must formally integrate local actors, particularly women and pastoralist communities, into climate planning and financing, treating indigenous knowledge as a policy resource rather than an anecdote. Donors must simplify access to climate finance so that community-based organisations can deploy resources at the speed vulnerability demands, rather than routing funding exclusively through national governments and large INGOs. And climate governance frameworks must explicitly address information integrity, with regional bodies, including the African Union, investing in trusted community messengers and credible local media as core adaptation infrastructure, not communication add-ons.
Africa’s climate challenge will not be resolved by better models or larger budgets alone. All three speakers were united on this point: the real test will be whether communities are trusted, whether their knowledge shapes the systems designed to protect them, and whether the information environment makes honest public conversation about what is at stake possible at all.
What this Means for RLRI’s Work
The webinar, organised by RLRI Africa Program’s Climate Adaptation and Resilience team, is part of the organisation’s ongoing effort to make climate action more grounded, inclusive, and effective across the continent. This work focuses on bringing local and indigenous voices into climate conversations, supporting adaptation strategies that are designed by and for communities, and ensuring that African evidence shapes global climate policy, not the other way around.
The discussion also brought into sharp focus several gaps that the organization is committed to closing. These include the gap between what communities know and what policies actually reflect, between research findings and the decisions that get made, between grassroots action and institutional support, and between the work of researchers and the realities of practitioners on the ground.
One gap that stood out in particular was around information integrity. As Heffernan made clear, even the best-designed and best-funded adaptation strategy will struggle to succeed if the information environment is polluted with false narratives and public trust has broken down. For the RLRI Africa Program, tackling misinformation and building the conditions for honest public conversation about climate change are not secondary; they are central to everything else the organisation does.
