 Carrier is a large project which seeks to deliver research on climate change through a consortium and collaborative approach and it's a build-up of a former project which looked at climate change adaptation funded by DFID and IDRC. There are about 300 applications for carrier funding, targeting hotspots, mountain areas, deltas, and semi-arid zones. Why so many applications? This is what we call a sweet project, 16 million US dollars over a seven-year period for each of the projects. It turned out that we ended up with four carrier projects. We have one, nowhere which looks at mountains. We have two projects that look at semi-arid and we have one project that looks at deltas. And University of Ghana, I believe, is the only institution that has two of these carrier projects running at the same time. So ASA stands for adaptation at scale in semi-arid regions as the ASA. I am presenting on behalf of a very large group of people. The ASA team is about a hundred plus covering many, many institutions. I am the country lead for the ASA project in Ghana. The countries that are covered, Mali and Ghana in West Africa, India, which is a continent by itself, Ethiopia and Kenya, Namibia and Botswana. The focus of the project is to improve the lives of the most marginalized. I am the director of the Institute for Environment here, but I also teach in a program on climate change and sustainable development. I often ask my students, they are all graduate students, who is most affected by climate change? And when you distill it, you find that the most affected is the rural African farmer in the arid and semi-arid, usually female, usually in a female-headed household, and usually with no alternative form of livelihood apart from subsistence farming. So we have some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. I do appreciate. I've been in Bangladesh, in Rasha'i, I've been in the Sundarbans. I know the problems that you have in climate change in Bangladesh, which I would say are of the tipping point variety. You have a storm, so forth. But the problems we have in Africa are more of the creeping change type, long-term chronic problems, which in some ways can be more painful. These are some images from various project sites, but we are looking at social diversity, many levels of governance, both from the very low level at the household level of governance. In Ghana, we have a phrase, the man is the head of the house. Danian men, do you agree? But then the women say, you may be the head of the house, but the woman is the neck. Where you turn is directed by the neck, not by the head. So you may think you're in control, but I'm sorry you're not. These are the project partners. I won't go through all of them. I'll just highlight the fact that we have a very high presence of practitioner in our project. Oxfam is there. We have this water NGO, and this is another forestry-related NGO in India, but we are dealing with how our research can go into practice, how we can use our research, and I'll touch upon that later. It's managed by a unit in Cape Town. In fact, Cape Town, the African Climate Development Institute, I think it's right, ACDI, led the proposal development. Our approach is we have several research streams, maybe a little difficult for you to read on the screen, but ecosystem land change, governance, knowledge systems, social differentiation, and well-being. And well-being, you're talking about human existence in its broader sense. We are cross-regional in that we are looking at some approaches across the different regions. And you find here that we have migration and mobility as one of these cross-regional approaches. We are also trying to pull information from these different countries, these different levels of operation in such a way we can have high-level synthesis, synthesis that we can draw larger answers to very fundamental questions. And I'll now talk about some case studies, looking at mobility and migration because of the theme of this conference. An approach was used called mental modeling. Now, mental modeling is something as an ecotoxicologist, limnologist, I know very little about. As the project lead, they come and tell me, oh, God, and we are going up north to do mental modeling. I say, okay, bye. And the team goes up north and they do mental modeling. So if you ask me questions about what mental modeling is, I'm sorry, I will not be able to answer. I'm not even sure if they know themselves what mental modeling is. But they came up with a series of, okay, this is the normal issues, interviews, what do you call it, structured questionnaires, normal ways of getting data from people. But in addition to this, we are also getting information about the ecosystems and the ecosystem service delivery. The countries, India, Botswana, Kenya, and Ghana, and we came up with two things. Basically, we are using the barriers and enablers approach. So what pushes people or pulls people? Drought, of course, debt, death of a household head, which is something quite important. Job opportunities and, of course, conflict. And the different colored, different flags of the nations shows the relative importance of these accelerators of mobility, which are, as I said, both push factors and pull factors. The movement is usually from rural to urban. But that is not always the case, because we have seasonal migrants who move in the dry season to the urban and in the rainy season, they move back from the urban to the rural. At the same time, we have breaks to mobility, things that are keeping people back at home, community. You find that the safety nets created by people's communities makes them more comfortable. And these communities can be communities based on religious grounds or based on the standing one has in the community. The peer recognition that you have, which makes you feel that you'd rather be a very big fish in your small pond than come to Accra and be a nobody. Obligation. Culturally, we are things that we have to do as a people in the community. And these are a couple of them working on the mother's farm, look after grandma. And this is again where that gender differentiation comes in often. Because you find that women, apart from the fact that they have to raise the food that the family have to eat, they are often the primary caregiver to the very young and the very old. Access to land and housing. Their business is established. And of course, there's conflict or there's a lack of opportunity because of a lack of education. So they feel that moving is not going to better their lot. And again, we've tried to summarize by use of the different sizes of flags and which flag is those that are most important. What are the implications for adaptation? Moving out reduces exposure to uncertainty. Moving in can increase exposure to non-climatic risks and narrowing of adaptation options. One of the things that we fail to realize is that that shift of the rural community from rural to urban often reduces the standard of living where they are having to have water sources more polluted than what they would have at home. That the sort of food they are eating is actually less nutritious than what they would have eaten if they stayed at home. Adaptation is seen as a behavioral change. But there's another social dimension of adaptation linked to mobility. Who moves? Usually it is the hardworking men who feel obliged to look after their families. So who is left behind? It's the people who really don't want to put much effort into life. I don't want to use the word lazy but I've said it. So if you are a child growing up in a village where most of the active working population have left the village and you see a man and you ask the child, what does the man do? The man gets up in the morning, he goes to the pitot cellar, this is a local alcoholic beverage. He drinks kalabash, comes home and asks for, where's my food? Then he sleeps. That is what a man does. They do not grow up in an environment which has the old type social values being promoted when you have that close knit integrated family unit. Implications for the SDGs. SDGs I take as the short term. We have another goal. In Ghana we have a 40 year goal but we also have Africa 2063. Those are our development targets. I've just been chairing a debate this morning on the possibility of achieving SDG6 in Ghana. And surprisingly the people who believed it could not be achieved won the debate. But these are a list of six of the SDGs all tied to migration and mobility. But the most important has been forgotten, water. And this is not because my prime research area is water but the fact that we are working in semi-arid means that we are working under a certain amount of water stress. Now the visitors to Ghana do not realize that a cry is actually the driest part of Ghana but it is despite the rains you had this morning. So because everything is tied to everything you cannot look at migration and mobility in isolation. You have to look at the broader picture in terms of ecosystem function, in terms of the psychology of the people, in terms of the long term prospects including issues of taking risk. What is the way forward? Well, we have this concept in the ASA career program of research into use. What we are trying to do is make sure the research we do does not end up on the shelves or is not just to produce papers so that we can get promotion and recognition by our peers and fellow academics. So from what we have done already, we have already started identifying certain directions which we can move in. So what are the critical investments that are required to promote farming all year round? Now one would assume, oh irrigation, but if you are in an area of the country where the predictions, models and established data trends are that you are going to have less water, maybe having irrigation dams is not the most sensible thing to do. Maybe we should be looking at alternate crops which are already pre-adapted to very low rainfall conditions and can grow all year round. How do we support communities of practice that already exist? If we can strengthen those established ways of interacting with communities that help them adapt, it is to our own benefit rather than trying to recreate models of interaction that they are not familiar with. And finally, is it possible to address the challenges of this rural urban drift by having an integrated approach to both SDGs and adaptation policies? I happen to have been the unfortunate person who had to deliver the climate change policy for the country and the master plan that followed. And it was a great, great difficult thing to harmonize all the policies such that each would support the other. But the end, after two years and almost 60 stakeholder consultations, I think we managed to get a document that did so. So with that, Madam Chair, I'll say thank you very much for your attention.