By Wuraola Oyedokun
The Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Design and Management, Lead City University, Ibadan, Prof. Grace Oloukoi, and other 15 institutions in Africa have secured a grant amounting to five million Canadian Dollars for the Pioneering Climate Adaptation REsilience (CLARE) project.
Oloukoi, a Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, disclosed this during a press conference at the International Conference Centre of the university.
Out of CAD 5 million, Lead City University is participating in a research collaboration with a grant of CAD 325,876 which was successfully secured by Prof. Oloukoi.
According to the scholar, this is a sub-contract of a project with the title: ‘A Pan-African and Trans-disciplinary Lens on the Margins: Tackling the Risks of Extreme Events (PALM-TREEs)’.
While explaining the details of the breakthrough, the professor said: ‘’Palm-Trees, a project worth 5,370, 300 Canadian dollars is one of the CLimate Adaptation and REsilience (CLARE), a UK-Canada framework research programme mainly funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (UK-FCDO) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
‘’ Palm-Trees is being implemented in six countries – Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya and DR Congo – and 16 institutions across Africa and the United Kingdom with the University of Cape Town as the lead organisation where the Project Consortium Office domiciles under the leadership of Prof. Abiodun Babatunde.
‘’Other partners include the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Lead City University, University of Lagos, University of Oxford, UK Met Office, University of Nairobi, Kwame University of Science and Technology, the Nigerian Institute for Social Economic Research (NISER) and University of Yaoundé.
‘’The project emphasises lived experiences methodology and the dynamics of indigenous knowledge to understand the dimensions of climate risks based on the complex social identities of the margins in local communities and to ensure inclusive adaptation policies in Africa’’.
In Nigeria, Oloukoi is working with her colleagues, Prof. Mayowa Fasona from the University of Lagos and Prof. Andrew Onwuemele from the Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER).
The project is focusing on Lagos as a city-scale study on flooding and heat waves and the Middle Belt as a regional scale study on agricultural drought and flooding.
Continuing, the don said: ‘’The project will deconstruct the dimensions of impacts of these extremes on livability, livelihoods and well-being of the margins. The margins are the vulnerable; the population groups that lack representation or voice in climate adaptation discourse.
‘’These include the homeless, the aged, the children, the women, the immigrants and the physically challenged. The project also provides opportunities for Early Career Scientists (ECS) who are being supported for their doctoral and postdoctoral research. Oloukoi is also serving as the Focal Lead for Gender and Social Inclusion for the Palm-Trees project across Africa.
‘’The inter-connected work packages for the Palm-Trees project are: social impacts of climate extremes, physical impacts of extreme events, climate resilient solutions and capacity strengthening’’.
She stated further that the specific outputs of the project include reduced barriers to sustainable knowledge networks, more equitable relationships between communities, practitioners, policy makers and researchers, transferable methodology to deal with multidimensional compounds of extreme events and sustainable change based on nature-based adaptation strategies.
‘’The project implementation has commenced and this will run for 42 months, till January, 2027. Inception meetings were already held at Lagos and Ilorin as parts of Stakeholders’ Engagement and Community Entry strategies during which the media, the communities, government agencies, non-state actors, knowledge brokers and scientists brainstormed to harvest ideas for the actualization of Palm-Trees project in Nigeria.
‘’Lead City University is providing institutional support for the implementation of the project. This scholarship milestone will foster the global visibility of faculty members of Lead City University, Nigeria’’, she added.
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