Location: Remote Base
Application Deadline: 30 April 2021 or until filled
Type of contract: 6 months consultancy contract
Language(s) required: English (fluent writing and oral skills)
ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION
WorldFish is an international, non-for-profit research organization that works to reduce hunger, malnutrition and poverty by improving fisheries and aquaculture. With a 45-years track record of leading-edge science, WorldFish generates research evidence and innovations to inform sustainable practices and inclusive policies that enable better livelihoods and healthier diets for millions of poor people, particularly women, who depend on fish for food, nutrition and income. WorldFish is a member of CGIAR , the world’s largest global partnership on agriculture research and innovation for a food secure future.
ABOUT THE POSITION
Marine and freshwater resources provide millions of people across the world with livelihoods and provide a range of critical ecosystem services. One billion people worldwide rely on aquatic foods as their main or only source of animal protein. Aquatic foods including fish provide essential micronutrients to people’s diets that cannot be found or a difficult to source elsewhere. These ecosystems are affected by climate change through gradual warming, ocean acidification, and changes in the frequency, intensity and location of extreme events.
Climate change is one of the leading causes of severe food crises, negatively influencing all aspects of food security including food availability, access, utilisation, and stability. The majority of past and current interventions to address these challenges have at best focused on maintaining status-quo. This strategy is partly influenced by the implicit assumption and belief that relative to the gloomy future scenario under climate change, communities are better-off maintaining the status-quo.
In a world where significant sustainable development challenges persist (e.g. poverty, inequalities and environmental degradation), maintaining status-quo is not only insufficient but also decouples responses to climate change and sustainable development objectives and aspirations.
Foresight analyses and consultations have outlined broad options for future scenarios. But the focus on shorter term adaptation to climate change has limited a collective ambition for defining how to reach the longer term desirable future scenarios. The focus is also often on incremental adaptation measures (which are undoubtedly important) but less attention is paid to systemic changes required to realize a prosperous future. Therefore, there is a need to reimagine climate change responses and work towards unleashing the full potentials and realize prosperity aspirations of aquatic foods dependent communities.
Step 1: Visualizing a Prosperous Future Under Changing Climate
We have sufficient understanding of the negative impacts of climate change on the livelihoods of aquatic foods dependent communities. In a study completed recently and currently under review, by 2100, all countries will face ‘high’ or ‘very high’ hazard scores for marine and freshwater fisheries and freshwater aquaculture. It is also clear that low and middle-income countries will be most impacted. Moreover, the mitigating greenhouse gases alone will not reverse the trend. Climate mitigation activities will substantially reduce climate hazards, but are insufficient to avoid negative aquatic food system outcomes as a certain degree of climate change is unavoidable. Therefore, there is a need to define a prosperity agenda for aquatic food systems so millions of livelihoods who depend on these resources continue to survive and thrive.
There is a critical knowledge gap on what an equitable and prosperous aquatic food system under climate change could look like: how to transform the world’s many and diverse aquatic food systems? Prosperity under changing climate can be viewed along analogous pathways: immanently (where some biophysical changes will favour some production systems) or intentionally through significant investment in curbing climate hazard, reducing vulnerabilities and/or identifying new viable livelihood opportunities.
Historically, the notion of ‘prosperity’ has been dominated by socio-political and economic indicators. Prosperity is a fluid concept that is amenable to a specific context and therefore requires a pluralistic approach to developing a framework to understand, visualize and subjectively and objectively measure it. There is a growing call to make a shift from a narrow interpretation of the concept to one that encompasses ecological, cultural, equity, food and nutritional security dimension