Africa is commonly presented as the continent most vulnerable to climate change, yet current climate predictions for Eastern Africa are uncertain: increased rainfall seems as likely as aridity and there will be considerable spatial and temporal variation. If the future is unclear, the past is less so with Eastern African communities having long histories of experiencing and making the most out of extreme weather events. The region thus presents a unique historic record of adaptation and resilience that can and occasionally does feed into current perceptions and responses.

As an idea, climate change is also finding wide salience, increasingly taking on a multitude of roles and providing justification for all sorts of policies, actions, and interventions, as well as creating a variety of social, political and economic opportunities. In Eastern Africa climate change provides a rationale for practices as diverse as the gazetting of forest water catchments and carbon capture schemes, programmes for renewable energy , the contested promotion of industrial agriculture, and the El Niño-proofing of urban spaces. The overwhelming certainty that broad scale climate change is ‘here’ and is having an impact, coupled with the uncertainty of specific predictions and affects, make climate change a powerful multivalent ideal in contemporary Eastern Africa.

This half day interdisciplinary workshop co-organised by UCL Institute for Global Prosperity and UCL African Studies aims to explore the nature of current climate predictions for Eastern Africa and the broad social and political implications of these predictions. Conference papers from a range of disciplines will draw on both physical and social scientific data and ground these in empirical case-studies from the region. Speakers will be largely drawn from UCL and partner organisations and will showcase the disciplinary breadth of climate change research being undertaken by UCL in the region. We aim to attract a wide disciplinary audience and hope that the conference will open up new avenues for interdisciplinary dialogue and research across the university and beyond.

Image credit: Climate Investment Funds