ON THE SAME MAP: Gigamapping as a strategic tool to support Pakistan’s policy response to climate change induced food security vulnerabilities

Abstract

Pakistan is the fifth-most vulnerable country to the long-term impacts of anthropogenic climate change, as reported in the 2018 Climate Risk Index by GermanWatch. In addition to posing other pressing challenges such as increasingly frequent heat waves and exceedingly devastating extreme weather events, climate change also threatens the bedrock of Pakistan’s economy and society: agriculture. Changing weather patterns—unpredictable and unseasonable rains on the one hand and droughts on the other—affect sowing and harvesting schedules, impact water availability, and lead to events like last spring’s locust swarm, jeopardizing the country’s food security. Federal and provincial governments are drafting policies and programs to address these vulnerabilities, research institutes and academia are producing relevant, high-quality research, and a variety of donors are providing funding for many of these endeavors. Yet, experts contend that the country remains unprepared to effectively address its climate change-induced food security vulnerabilities. They identify a number of factors as contributors to this lack of preparedness: lack of effective collaboration between stakeholders, wavering political will, gaps in policy enforcement, and confusion about the effects of the Eighteenth Amendment which devolved some ministries from the federal to the provincial governments, including those in the agriculture and health sectors. Working in collaboration with food security researchers in Pakistan, this project explores whether a systemic design approach, and in particular gigamapping—a technique for collaboratively creating highly detailed maps of complex systems to understand them and find opportunities for interventions within—can help these researchers identify gaps and opportunities in the country’s response to its climate change-induced food security vulnerabilities, allowing them to play a strategic role to support this decision making. The project also investigates the utility and viability of an interactive approach to gigamapping.