Module 0.2. Applicable Tools

Various methods exist for analysing the broader context in which a Locally Led Action on Climate, Peace and Security project is intended to take place. Successful projects will generally make use of several tools to inform a more comprehensive understanding.

Module 0.2 provides an introduction, instructions for use and, where relevant, step-by-step worksheet for each of the following tools and approaches:

In addition to the methods presented here, many of the tools included in Units 1, 2 and 3 may also be useful for a facilitator or project team to use for initial scoping. (See, for example, the mapping exercises in Unit 1 and scenario forecasting in Unit 3.) Likewise, these tools should not be viewed as exclusive to a baseline assessment; rather, they can be useful for analysis at a variety of project stages – particularly when completed collaboratively.

This module will help users:

• conduct a baseline assessment with attention to environmental, social, economic and political factors
• use existing platforms and conceptual frameworks to identify an area’s key risks and opportunities related to climate and conflict
• support monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning processes by initiating iterative forms of analysis to inform a more robust action plan

What is ACLED?

ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) is the highest-quality and most widely used near real-time source on political violence and protest data worldwide. It is a free, publicly available database that records real-world events related to political violence, demonstrations, and other types of conflict. It includes who was involved, what happened, where and when it occurred and the type of event.

Why USE ACLED?

ACLED is an independent, impartial non-profit organisation that collects and shares data on violent conflict and protest all over the world. Their mission is “to provide accurate and accessible data and analysis to better inform decisions that reduce violent conflict”. ACLED hosts more than two million data points, and their team adds more every day – creating the world’s most accurate and updated collection of information about conflict.

Known users of ACLED include UN Peacekeeping, UN Women, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Bank, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization and a host of governments and their international institutions, as well as non-government organisations such as Amnesty International, Mercy Corps and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Data from ACLED can help (1) identify conflict events and trends relevant to a project area and (2) validate, revise and/or add evidence to analytical processes, in order to more robustly conduct a baseline or other assessment. Incorporating data from platforms such as ACLED strengthens the credibility and completeness of an analysis by blending qualitative insights with empirical data.

What are some limitations of ACLED?

While ACLED aims to be as comprehensive, accurate and updated as possible, it is not entirely real-time, precise or inclusive. Conflict events and forms of protest that are underreported are likely to be missed, at least partially, by the platform. Tracking fatalities and confirming causal relations can be especially challenging in particularly remote or high-intensity conflict contexts. Geographically, data is generally reported by city or village rather than specific neighbourhood or particular street. Large-scale datasets should always be contextualised with local expertise and perspectives.

Why use Strata?

Strata is free and open source. The platform provides practitioners, analysts, and policymakers with a tool to assess where and how climate and environmental risks converge with other vulnerability factors.

Geospatial analysis can help stakeholders raise awareness of converging risks; design and prioritise policy and programming responses; and monitor and evaluate interventions. These insights can be used for analysis, planning, and monitoring for climate action, natural resource management, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding.

What are some limitations of Strata?

Strata is designed to be a flexible tool that can be adapted to different geographical contexts. However, the models may not always fully capture the unique socio-economic, cultural, or political factors of specific regions. Its insights are most valuable when combined with other analytical lenses.

Ecosystem services are complex and often interdependent. Strata models may not always adequately capture the full range of services provided by ecosystems or the potential cascading effects of land use changes on these services, especially in areas with high biodiversity or intricate ecological networks.

Effective use of the tool requires a high level of technical expertise, including knowledge of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and environmental science. For non-experts, navigating the tool and interpreting results may present a barrier to its widespread use.

What is driver mapping?

Driver mapping tools help analyse the impact of human activity on the environment – and vice versa – by considering how various socioeconomic, environmental, and political forces ‘drive’ climate change, fragility, and conflict. While geospatial data platforms like Strata focus on quantifiable information and empirical observations, approaches like driver mapping showcase explanatory narratives to help consider what that data means, and how overlapping factors will interact.

Driver mapping is used typically for integrated natural resources management such as water, but can also be helpful in understanding and addressing air pollution, biodiversity issues, or ecosystems like wetlands and agricultural environments. Driver maps generally make use of the DPSIR framework, which incorporates drivers, pressures, state, impact and responses:

• Drivers: This refers to human activity such as industry, tourism, consumption, urbanisation and population growth. Typically, the lifestyle and dynamics of production and consumption of the studied society will be analysed at the state level, but local, regional, and global patterns can influence these drivers too and should be considered.
• Pressures: This captures the results of human activity and drivers that affect the environment. Pressures will be different across geospatial scale and time, and will be dependent on technological development too. For example, this will affect resource consumption – including their extraction and use rate, but also waste or pollution generated.
• State: Pressures can have effects on ecosystem health, which may change its state. These changes are generally negative and could be caused by direct and indirect processes that might not always be easy to identify. The state of ecosystems should be assessed through physical, chemical, and biological factors which would serve to determine whether an environment is degraded.
• Impact: Human livelihoods and the environment are closely interconnected, with many lifestyles depending entirely on natural resources and the environment. Environmental degradation can adversely affect human well-being by limiting access to essential resources such as food, water, and shelter. However, it is important to consider not only the availability of these resources but also their quality, as both are crucial to sustaining human welfare. Furthermore, healthy ecosystems provide valuable services that support economic activities.
• Response: This regards the actions taken to prevent, mitigate, adapt, or fix problems that undermined the healthy state of an ecosystem. This is done by trying to control the drivers and pressures by enacting policies, laws, and projects which can be international (e.g. conventions and treaties), transboundary (e.g. shared resource management policies), national (e.g. domestic laws and policies), and local (e.g. adaptation or restoration projects).

Driver maps identify pressures and shocks, highlight structural dynamics that influence how those factors are experienced by the system, and trace their resulting outcomes.

Why create a driver map?

The DPSIR framework is relatively simple, allowing for individuals to contribute to analysis regardless of whether they have an extensive environmental, scientific, or technical background. It can be an excellent support tool for decision-making – in the context of a baseline assessment, it can tell project managers what to watch out for, and which data to be sure to look for or collect.

Driver mapping is also a helpful tool for building both conflict sensitivity and climate responsiveness into Locally Led Action on Climate, Peace and Security from the very beginning of a project, as it showcases key interactions between human activities and environmental systems.

At this stage, a driver map can be fairly superficial and generalised: details of exactly how the relationships work, where feedback loops arise, and how different elements of the community and system experience interactions differently can be further analysed in future LLACPS stages (see Units 1 and 2 especially). Its purpose during the initial scoping phase is to ensure consideration to a variety of environmental, social, political, and economic factors.

What are some limitations of driver mapping?

Driver maps are a fairly superficial form of assessment, best used to help summarise a situation and point toward issues to analyse further or ideas to consider. They tend to represent relationships linearly, making it difficult to capture feedback loops and multidirectional interactions. Moreover, they provide limited insight into the relative influence of individual drivers on specific dynamics and impacts.

As a starting point for bringing together climate and conflict concerns, these limitations are not particularly concerning, but it is important to bear a driver map’s generic nature in mind. Driver maps should not be used as substitutes for more thorough forms of problem analysis presented in Unit 2.

What is a climate risk assessment?

A climate risk assessment is a specialised form of risk assessment that uses climate signals (e.g., temperatures, precipitation rates, storm patterns) to identify climate hazards (wildfires, droughts, salinisation, etc.) and consider the risk they pose to an area.

A central tenet of risk management is that the risk posed by a potential hazard is dependent both on its likelihood and its severity: particular events might be catastrophic, but if they are incredibly unlikely to occur, they would be rated as ‘low risk’; another event might be incredibly likely, but cause minimal negative impact – and would thus also be considered as ‘low risk’. Climate risk assessment processes build on this approach, informing responses to climate change by analysing both a system’s vulnerability and its exposure to climate hazards. The graphic below illustrates how the interactions between climate signals, climate hazards, vulnerability, and exposure can be used to assess climate-related risks.

Why conduct a climate risk assessment?

Beyond understanding the basics of what climate change is, locally led projects need to be aware of how climate change is likely to affect their specific region and context. Climate change risk assessments help identify potential and ongoing threats posed by long-term shifts in global and regional climate patterns. These risks may be sudden onset (e.g., hurricanes, heatwaves) or slow onset events (e.g., desertification, sea level rise), both of which have significant environmental, social and economic impacts.

Differentiating between sudden and slow onset hazards – and understanding the risk they pose – helps inform interventions. Sudden disasters demand immediate crisis response and short-term recovery measures, while slow onset changes necessitate proactive planning and long-term adaptation. Recognising these distinctions allows communities, governments and organisations to allocate resources effectively, balance emergency preparedness with future-focused resilience and implement policies that address both immediate threats and gradual environmental shifts.

WHAT ARE SOME LIMITATIONS OF CLIMATE RISK ASSESSMENT?

It’s important to understand that climate risk assessments have limitations: the analysis relies on historical data, observations and models to forecast likely outcomes, but predictions can never be made with absolute certainty – and the more local or specific an assessment is, the more difficult it is to be both accurate and precise.

Because there is a level of subjectivity in the vulnerability, exposure, and overall risk scores, a climate risk assessment may be affected by the evaluator’s bias or uncertainty. Participatory approaches to the assessment that draw on varied perspectives can help mitigate this concern.

What is conflict and development analysis?

Conflict and Development Analysis (CDA) is a methodological approach designed to analyse specific contexts and develop strategies to reduce or eliminate the impact and consequences of violent conflict. It provides a deeper understanding of issues that can drive conflict and dynamics that have the potential to promote peace.

Conflict and Development Analysis facilitates a comprehensive examination of conflict drivers, stakeholders, key dynamics, and engines of peace. This analysis contributes to the development of clear and attainable peacebuilding programming and policy objectives, as well as indicators for measuring and monitoring results. The tool is versatile and can be used by practitioners to gain insights into complex conflict situations and inform effective interventions.

Why conduct a conflict and development analysis?

Conflict and Development Analysis ensures that interventions are informed by the local context and maximise the probability of effectiveness and sustainability. It helps generate an understanding of existing conflicts in a given situation and identify relevant stakeholders, including those with vested interests in the conflict’s outcome. This enables practitioners to minimise the risks of interventions that may inadvertently intensify conflicts and do more harm than good.

Conducting a conflict and development analysis will provide a more comprehensive overview of contextual dynamics and root causes of conflict. This can support early detection of worsening situations or new issues that need to be addressed. The analysis process contributes to sustainable development results by deepening understanding of peace and conflict dynamics, ensuring that appropriate mechanisms can be implemented to include all groups and communities in the development process. Even in situations where conflict has already become violent, CDA can inform interventions that can help manage the consequences of violence, support the de-escalation of violence or even address the root causes of violence.

What are some limitations of conflict and development analysis?

While Conflict and Development Analysis is valuable for understanding conflict situations, its effectiveness depends heavily on the quality and accuracy of the information gathered and used. If the data collection process is flawed or biased, it may lead to incomplete or inaccurate conclusions, potentially affecting the effectiveness of subsequent interventions.

Another limitation is that conflict situations are often dynamic and rapidly changing. A conflict and development analysis will provide a snapshot of the conflict at a particular time, but it may not capture sudden shifts or emerging factors that could significantly alter the conflict landscape. This underscores the importance of keeping pace with recent developments and regularly updating the analysis. Additionally, while Conflict and Development Analysis aims to be comprehensive, it may not always capture the full complexity of deeply rooted, multi-faceted conflicts, particularly in cases where there are drivers of conflict that are less visible or are more difficult to analyse.

What is Political Economy Analysis?

Political economy analysis examines the interaction of political and economic factors within a society to understand how power, resources and interests shape governance and reform efforts. It focuses on the formal and informal ‘rules of the game’ that characterise how a given sector (e.g., Climate, Peace and Security) works in practice. The power relationships, interests and incentives of a wide range of stakeholders related to Climate, Peace and Security are central to political economy analysis, emerging as key factors in how particular reforms are likely to be supported or resisted.

Increasingly, integrating climate policy analysis into political economy analysis is essential — particularly in sectors where climate adaptation or mitigation efforts intersect with governance, land use, or natural resource management. Understanding how climate policies such as National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) interact with political interests, institutional arrangements and power dynamics provides a fuller picture of reform possibilities and barriers.

Why conduct a Political Economy Analysis?

The use of political economy analysis is essential for designing solutions that align with the realities of the political and economic landscape. By identifying the incentives and interests that drive behaviour, political economy analysis enables policymakers to create more effective and politically feasible programs. This is particularly critical in sectors affected by climate change, where adaptation policies can shift access to resources, create new sources of tension or open windows of opportunity for reform.

By incorporating climate policy analysis into political economy analysis, practitioners can assess how climate-related commitments are prioritised or deprioritised in practice, how they affect power dynamics at national or local levels and who stands to gain or lose from their implementation. Embedding political economy analysis into the program cycle ensures continuous adaptation to evolving political and climate contexts. It can also enable more productive communication and collaboration at national and international levels. Understanding the priorities and keywords used in national and international policy circles is essential to engaging with such actors.

What are some limitations of Political Economy Analysis?

Political economy analysis should not be approached as a one-off report, but as a lens or way of thinking and working. Political economy analysis should be revisited routinely throughout programming, with reform strategies and activities adapted as required. It is key that operations remain responsive to political realities and changes in the context — including those introduced by shifting climate risks or evolving climate policy agendas.

Another limitation is the potential sensitivity of political economy analysis findings, as analysing political and economic power structures can pose risks to researchers, local actors and institutions. In some cases, putting such information in writing may not be feasible, requiring more informal, continuous engagement. Climate policy analysis, when integrated into political economy analysis, can also reveal politically sensitive trade-offs or inconsistencies between public climate commitments and actual practices, which must be handled with care.