Short and Masters Courses, Research, Internship and Funding

Update on International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD):

1. Short Courses:

We have held four short courses over 2011 as follows:

-          Cities and Climate Change for city planners, NGOs and academics from Asia and Africa in April

-          Research on Climate Change for researchers from Consultative Group on International Agricultural research (CGIAR) institutes in Asia and Africa in July

-          Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) for people working on DRR in Asia and Africa

-          Planning and Mainstreaming Climate Change into National Development Planning for officials from Planning Ministries from Asia and Africa in November

This brings to a total of seven Short Courses on different topics over the last two years which means we now have a total of over 150 Alumni from over thirty countries in Asia and Africa.

We are planning the next (eighth) Short Course for Climate Change Negotiators from Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in February 2012.

2. Masters degree course:

The Masters degree course on Climate Change and Development curriculum has been approved by the Academic Council of the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) and has been submitted it to the National University Grants Commission (UGC) who have to approve all courses offered in the country.

We are hoping to get the final approval soon and to start the first batch of Masters students in 2012.

3. Research:

Our flagship research programme on Community Based Adaptation (CBA) is called Action Research on Community Adaptation in Bangladesh ( www.arcab.org ) and is led by BCAS is gradually taking shape with the institutional design having been completed and the work on Baseline, Monitoring and Evaluation (BM+E) for CBA during the first year.

4. Visiting research students and interns:

We had several visiting international research students and interns from the United Kingdom and Sweden working at ICCCAD during 2011.We currently have a visiting Fulbright scholar Kevan Christensen from the United States spending nine months at ICCCAD doing research on community based adaptation. Several more research students and interns are expected during 2012.

5. Funding:

-          DFID: We are still half-way through the initial start-up funding we received (through IIED) from DFID-Bangladesh.

-          Rockefeller Foundation: IIED has also just been awarded a new five-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to support two new full-time faculty in ICCCAD/IUB and also for running an annual Short Course on Cities and Climate Change from 2012 onwards.

-          Munich Re Foundation: IIED has just been awarded a five-year grant from the Munch Re Foundation (MRF) to support a collaborative research programme on disaster reduction and climate change in collaboration with United Nations University (UNU) Bonn, Germany.

-          Government of Netherlands: Three year grant through the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands to provide capacity building support to the Dhaka University of Engineering and Technology (DUET) in Gazipur, outside Dhaka.