ABSTRACT
Many of the world’s poorest people are exposed to the risks of climate change (IPCC, 2007). The ‘faces’ of poverty include the 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night and 200 million women that are at risk of maternal mortality. Climate change stands to exacerbate existing interlinked problems of social inequality, ecological degradation, and conf lict over natural resources. The challenge of climate change is ‘messy’ and not easy to solve with conventional methods of scientific inquiry (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993). A greater focus on how people on the ground build resilience through existing social institutions and how they relate to environmental risk is needed urgently. In this regard, development studies can inform scientists about how human institutions such as families and kinship groups have evolved over time, how these social institutions work most effectively and what the barriers are that they face in adapting to a changing climate.
