Beyond 1.5°C: Why collaboration is our best climate-health adaptation strategy

Communities can navigate uncertainty when they’ve collectively imagined it. Participatory foresight methods, such as Transformative Scenario Planning (TSP),^[7] prepare people not just for one outcome based on today’s realities, but for multiple trajectories. These possible futures are both grounded in data and also encompass the outlier experiences of all stakeholders.

One major pitfall in addressing climate-health challenges is that people tend to rely on expert knowledge, often relying on data, research, and authority. While there is a place for expert knowledge, such knowledge often fails to activate the collective action of people who need to own and address their own problems.

In 2017-18, the Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR)^[8] and partners implemented a multi-state initiative using TSP across India. The work brought together farmers, government officials, academics, and civil society actors to co-create possible futures for their climate-stressed regions. These stakeholders came together over several workshops^[9] and months of planning. The impetus for this project was a recognition that communities didn’t only need more data, they needed the space to process their lived realities together, to understand their implications, confront trade-offs, and articulate their own role in shaping the future. These community-level engagements revealed that, while adaptation is often framed as a technical challenge, its success hinges on social capital, trust, and inclusive decision-making processes. Stakeholders shifted from viewing climate change as an external force to one over which they understood in its multiple manifestations and interconnected impacts.

The African Cities Water Adaptation (ACWA) Platform^[10] is a good example of how to address climate-related challenges. ACWA is a coalition of cities and partners, including research institutes, civil society actors, development agencies, national governments, businesses, private sector investment groups, national banks, professional consultancies and associations joining forces to advance urban water resilience in Africa. The ACWA Platform aims to coordinate, align, harmonize and scale existing programs, expertise and solutions across a wide network of partners to accelerate advocacy and implementation of new solutions to build resilient water systems in cities. This initiative has emphasized city-level collaboration across agencies, data transparency, and community engagement. One of the tangible results has been the establishment of the ACWA Fund, which employs an integrated approach to finance innovative urban water resilience solutions at scale. The fund aims to leverage at least $5 billion in funding and financing to implement strategic and innovative projects in 100 African cities by 2032.

To meaningfully address problems at the climate-health nexus, distributed ownership and leadership of the response are not just a nice-to-have; they are an imperative. Funders and conveners, as a whole, require an approach that does not replicate existing injustices and asymmetrical power dynamics but by creating a culture of genuine co-creation and co-responsibility.

A prerequisite to genuine systemic intervention is to engage with the relevant stakeholders in the multidimensional nature of who they are. Transforming a system requires attending to the system as a whole, to its parts, and to the relationships among these parts. Radical engagement entails relating with other people in three corresponding dimensions—as actors playing roles in the system, as parties with our own interests, and as entangled kin—not just in the one or two ways we’re most with.^[11]

It is through this kind of radical engagement that we begin to truly ‘see’ and appreciate the whole elephant, in reference to the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. In the story, each man touches a different part and draws a conflicting conclusion about what the elephant is. Only through genuine relationships and shared sense-making can we become aware of these diverse perspectives, understand the relationships between them, and allow a fuller picture to emerge.

As with the ACWA Platform process, which convened unlikely allies from diverse and often conflicting perspectives to confront urban water resilience, addressing the complex challenges at the climate-health nexus demands a reimagining of collaboration across disciplines, geographies, and power structures. Our work with funders, governments, civil society, and affected communities shows that the most resilient responses emerge not from siloed interventions but from inclusive, multi-stakeholder processes rooted in systems thinking.