Anna... ICTs, learning, adaptation (& sunshine)

Hi! I'm Anna Taylor. I work for the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), based at the Oxford Centre in the UK... although I just got back yesterday from a month in South Africa (which is home and currently far more sunny than here) where I worked out of our office at the University of Cape Town and did some fieldwork in Lesotho on rural livelihoods and the use of wetlands.

Much of the work I do at SEI Oxford is related to climate vulnerability and adaptation, livelihoods and water resource management, with a focus on actor-oriented participatory processes to support decision making and learning.

I have recently become increasingly involved and interested in issues of communication and learning in the context of social, organisational and individual development and adaptation. ICTs have an increasingly important role to play in connecting people and making information accessible but there is also the danger of perpetuating existing inequalities and gaps as well as creating new ones if we are not careful. Issues of access, skills, power, choice, inclusion, lifestyle, culture and language are all, I think, important ones to consider when discussing ICTs. The old adages of information and knowledge is power and the benefit of being well connected will no doubt remain as true as ever but they may well change in nature in the age of widespread use of ICTs.

One of the new initiatives we are heading up, which has an important ICT component, is that of developing a collaborative platform on climate adaptation, called weADAPT, providing guidance on climate risk management. One element of this platform is a wiki, collaboratively used for documenting and sharing information on adaptation process, including methods, tools, experiences, lessons, data, etc. Two big issues that are coming up for us in this regard are quality control / assurance and effectively communicating and dealing with uncertainty.

I am really looking forward to participating in this workshop because there is a lot of scope for using new technologies in adressing environment and development challenges, we already have a lot to learn from each others experiences and I'm sure we can together come up with some exciting new ideas!

See you in Uppsala.