GCAP Adaptation Academy

The Global Climate Adaptation Partnership (GCAP) offers professionals, with a range of academic backgrounds and work experience, the opportunity to develop expertise in climate adaptation through a certified training programme. With demand for climate adaptation expertise already outstripping supply, we know that this is a critical field of growth, providing many opportunities for career advancement.

Climate adaptation requires a new combination of knowledge and skills, bridging between the natural and social sciences, with the technical skills to analyse various data and the ‘people skills’ to foster group learning and support organisational change. GCAP offers professional certification, combining the acquisition of theoretical and methodological knowledge with practical experience, tailored to the needs and aspirations of each trainee.

Based on the premise that people learn most effectively when they are active, take responsibility for their own learning, and can apply it to their own context, the GCAP Academy takes a contract learning approach, linking an initial ‘basecamp’, providing training in core modules, with a trainee’s professional experience and working environment. This creates the flexibility to shape the training practices to each person’s needs, while providing the structure to ensure that the necessary outcomes are reached. The training course’s outcomes are established by GCAP, guided by the key skills, competencies and values necessary for an effective adaptation specialist. A learning contract is a document drawn up by the trainee and his/her tutor, which specifies what the trainee intends to learn, develop or improve, how this might be achieved, what the timescales are, how the achievement will be demonstrated, and who will assess it.

The initial basecamp is an opportunity to get an overall grounding in climate adaptation and to develop the peer group and mentoring networks that sustain learning for years to come. These basecamps will ultimately be offered at a variety of locations around the world. Classroom teaching and on-the-job learning will be supported through the use of an online learning platform (part of weADAPT.org) to share materials, streamline communication, and grow a community of learning and practice including current trainees, GCAP graduates, tutors and mentors. Each trainee will be required to build up a portfolio as a collection of evidence that the agreed learning outcomes have been achieved, as laid out in the learning contract. The Portfolio is reviewed by tutors and examiners and discussed with the trainee in a final accreditation interview, on the basis of which certification is awarded.

Core modules offered as part of the Academy will cover the following themes:
I. Framing the context for adaptation, from evaluation of policy frameworks and knowledge networks to entry points for awareness, strategy and adaptation planning
II. Monitoring risks, integrating climate change envelopes with baseline vulnerability
III. Screening decisions, using relevant approaches from simple participatory exercises to knowledge elicitation tools and robust decision making
IV. Planning outcomes, from adaptation scenario exercises to design of effective communication strategies and actions