Climate Resilience Challenge 2024: Adaptation Solutions from Project Upturn (Philippines)

The goal is to encourage communities to participate in the generation of evidence-based climate change knowledge that promotes climate change adaptation.

The Climate Resilience Challenge is a competition for innovative, interdisciplinary, and solution-oriented ideas to build and enhance resilience in the country. This year, the Climate Resilience Challenge will leverage an internally-led project: the OML Center’s Upturn Tool.

This decision-support tool, developed as part of Project Upturn, contains an inventory of climate adaptation solutions and provides an initial evaluation of their effectiveness in terms of economic, technical, environmental, and social feasibility, based on peer-reviewed literature and case studies conducted by various stakeholders. By assessing local climate change risks and prioritizing solutions, the Upturn Tool equips individuals and communities to fortify their adaptive capacity and resilience against the long-term effects of climate change.

To continually enrich the inventory with additional information and unlock further potential for adaptation, the Climate Resilience Challenge focuses on this year’s call for communities to contribute to this knowledge generation. This comprehensive approach aligns with the Center’s mission to enable communities to make informed decisions, harness evidence-based insights, and become active contributors to climate adaptation, fostering regenerative practices in the face of a changing climate landscape.

Priority Areas

• Grantees are expected to help generate supporting evidence and/or new information on the effectiveness of solutions provided in the Upturn Tool inventory. The knowledge generated should be able to contribute to different areas of effectiveness or feasibility, and how it contributes to increasing climate resilience:
  • Effectiveness of the Solution:
    • Technical feasibility: The grantee should generate relevant information on the following but not limited to: the level of information necessary for adoption, relevant skills/training necessary to implement the solution, and/or the solution’s potential replicability
    • Economic feasibility: The grantee should generate relevant information on the following but not limited to: the benefits and costs the implementation entails, and/or the potential gains for various groups in applying the solution (e.g. increased income, diversified livelihoods, etc.).
    • Social feasibility: The grantee should generate relevant information on the following but not limited to: cultural implications in implementing the solutions (if any), the level of social acceptability in the community or wider locality, and/or other dimensions that may provide implications in the adoption of the solution (institutional, political, etc.).
    • Environmental Impact: The grantee should generate relevant information on the following but not limited to: potential to generate positive environmental benefit, and/or if there are potential negative implications of implementing the solution to the environment.
  • Contribution to Resilience:
    • The model implementation and activity design must define concrete measures of resilience in the mid- to long-run based on the following indicators:
      • Increased adaptive capacity (skills, resources, infrastructure)
      • Increased adaptive action (effectiveness, feasibility, flexibility)
      • Contribution to Sustainable Development (food security, water sufficiency, environmental stability, human security, sustainable energy, knowledge and capacity development)

Prize Information

• The Top 3 proposals will be awarded a seed grant of PHP 300,000 each to implement the solution in their identified community.
• From the Top 3, the best implementer will further receive a PHP 200,000 prize.
• Other finalists will receive PHP 50,000 each.

Eligibility Criteria

• Competition open to local collaborators such as, but not limited to, local state universities and colleges (HEIs), civil society organizations (CSOs), and local government units (LGUs), or a consortium of the above.
• Teams can have a maximum of 6 official members including the Team Leader.
• Multiple submissions from each team will be accepted, but each proposed Upturn Solution should not be duplicated by a team.

For more information, visit Oscar M. Lopez Center.