Abstract
Climate change is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. The temperature of the Earth’s surface has significantly increased during the last five decades, mainly due to the high greenhouse gases triggered by the free advance of industrial processes. At the same time, climate change has a severe impact on countries and cities with high economic and social vulnerability, Latin America and the Caribbean being regions particularly fragile to changes in temperature. At the same time, social inequalities and low capacity of adaptation make these regions, territories highly sensitive to climate change. Hence, the impacts to which we will be confronted will be a portrait of the growing socio-economic and socio-territorial inequalities of the different regions of the world. It is essential that the search for solutions to this global crisis is transversal to the fight against the social inequalities by which we are challenged. As a result, it is necessary that the work towards the mitigation and adaptation of the impacts of climate change is not reduced to decision- making processes carried out exclusively by hegemonic groups. Rather, solutions should be developed from local communities and in conjunction with the spaces of production of knowledge of the territories that are directly affected. Universities have a very important role to play as organizations that form advanced human capital that synthesizes territorial and global knowledge and in their role of transferring skills to communities. This paper elaborates on the case study of the installation of Social Innovation Climate Action Labs in the Global South and their implications on accelerating the adaptive capacity of local communities.
Keywords
Social innovation, global south climate action, climate change, living labs.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2020.204
Citation
Carrasco, G.,and Soto, W.(2020) Social Innovation Labs for Climate Action: South to South Collaboration to Tackle Climate Change, in Leitão, R., Noel, L. and Murphy, L. (eds.), Pivot 2020: Designing a World of Many Centers - DRS Pluriversal Design SIG Conference, 4 June, held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2020.204
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Social Innovation Labs for Climate Action: South to South Collaboration to Tackle Climate Change
Climate change is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. The temperature of the Earth’s surface has significantly increased during the last five decades, mainly due to the high greenhouse gases triggered by the free advance of industrial processes. At the same time, climate change has a severe impact on countries and cities with high economic and social vulnerability, Latin America and the Caribbean being regions particularly fragile to changes in temperature. At the same time, social inequalities and low capacity of adaptation make these regions, territories highly sensitive to climate change. Hence, the impacts to which we will be confronted will be a portrait of the growing socio-economic and socio-territorial inequalities of the different regions of the world. It is essential that the search for solutions to this global crisis is transversal to the fight against the social inequalities by which we are challenged. As a result, it is necessary that the work towards the mitigation and adaptation of the impacts of climate change is not reduced to decision- making processes carried out exclusively by hegemonic groups. Rather, solutions should be developed from local communities and in conjunction with the spaces of production of knowledge of the territories that are directly affected. Universities have a very important role to play as organizations that form advanced human capital that synthesizes territorial and global knowledge and in their role of transferring skills to communities. This paper elaborates on the case study of the installation of Social Innovation Climate Action Labs in the Global South and their implications on accelerating the adaptive capacity of local communities.