Programme > Adaption and Resilience

Climate resilience and adaptive capacity across livelihoods, agriculture and ecosystems

Africa’s people, ecological endowment and indigenous knowledge are its greatest asset

The vision

Resilience as security, not survival: an Africa whose land, coastal, rural and urban economies remain stable and productive in a changing climate. An environment where families, farmers, workers and communities are protected from recurring crisis, where ecosystems are restored, and where climate risk is anticipated and managed instead of endured. In such a future, resilience is not a buffer against instability but a foundation for long-term economic transformation.

The challenge

Climate instability does not announce itself in policy documents. For millions of people across Africa, adaptation is not a future challenge, it is a lived reality. These pressures are not temporary shocks; they are signals of a sustained shift in the continent’s development risk profile. As extreme events recur, their effects accumulate. This vulnerability is most concentrated in the sectors that anchor livelihoods and growth.

Communities, farmers, pastoralists and fisherfolk are already adapting; drawing on lived experience and indigenous knowledge to steward land and marine resources under conditions that grow harder each season. The capability exists. The constraint lies in scale, coordination and finance.

Read our snapshot

Our role

The ACF works to bridge sectors, support coalitions and reinforce the systems that underpin adaptation over time. Our objective is to connect community knowledge, public policy and financial systems so that adaptation efforts reinforce economic resilience, protect ecosystems and support long-term stability.

  • We scale locally led resilience and ecosystem restoration, embedding community initiatives within supportive policy, financing and social protection frameworks that prioritise equity and local ownership.
  • We work to improve access to project-level finance for climate-resilient infrastructure and essential services; including water, river, ocean and food systems, risk management tools and adaptive social protection, and provide explicit support for community-led investment platforms that enable locally governed resilience at scale.
  • We strengthen adaptation governance, planning and investment frameworks, integrating nature-based and agroecological approaches alongside improved coordination across sectors and alignment between local practice and national strategy.
  • We reinforce regional resilience cooperation across shared water basins, food markets, rangelands and coastal ecosystems, recognising that climate risk transcends borders.
  • And we advance a fair and accessible adaptation finance architecture that supports durable institutional strengthening rather than short-term response cycles.

Our impact: African Food Systems Transformation Collective

The ACF established the African Food Systems Transformation Collective as an infrastructure that connects knowledge to power. The Collective brings together African experts from every region, working alongside advocacy and policy bodies in a network where research agendas are set by the questions that practitioners are grappling with. Innovations quietly building resilience are documented and connected, for the first time, directly to the advocacy strategies and funding decisions that can take them further.