Challenges to Equitable Climate Change Adaptation: Resilient Seed Production in Thailand
Name of applicant
Sofie Mortensen
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 1,120,000
Year
2024
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
Climate-smart agricultural technology is an important adaptation strategy to ensure future food production and smallholder farm incomes in a changing climate. Yet, as IPCC states, maladaptation, when adaptation measures inadvertently increase rather than decrease vulnerabilities, remains a key risk, making it crucial to evaluate climate-smart agriculture in terms of its socioeconomic co-benefits.
Why?
Research on climate-smart agriculture, however, overlooks the impacts on human development and under-theorize the socio-political and emotional processes that continue to marginalize vulnerable groups. Closing these knowledge gaps is important for designing climate-smart agriculture projects that promote equal societies (SDG 10) and wellbeing (SDG 3) in the future.
How?
To do so, the project uses the case of Thailand, a major producer and exporter of the climate-smart technology: resilient maize seeds. The project relies on ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative and participatory visual methods, including the novel body-mapping method to engage with the key producers of resilient maize seeds: Thai farmers and Myanmar migrants to understand their position.