The interior of Southern Africa, encompassing significant areas of drylands, will be severely impacted by climate change. The region rapidly needs to implement proactive adaptation policies to pre-empt the worst of these impacts. This requires a clear focus on the unique yet vulnerable attributes of dryland forests as integral to wide-ranging ecosystems providing a variety of socio-economic benefits and services.

These dryland forests are, however, already severely degraded from competing land uses and from over-use. To maintain and enhance their contribution to climate change adaptation requires implementing policies that incorporate full-cost accounting of natural capital; investment in restoration of degraded systems; enhancing connectivity for biodiversity responses as climate envelopes move; real-time research and monitoring; and incentivising and enabling community-based management to build local adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change. Specific guidance on the need to deliver livelihood benefits beyond climate change adaptation is crucial.

This briefing makes the following policy recommendations:

climate change adaptation must be the objective underpinning all future development planning, and investment in EbA (ie, the maintenance and restoration of ecological infrastructures) must be the foundation of all adaptation policy implementation natural forests (‘natural capital’) must be full-cost accounted in terms of biodiversity, ecosystem service, and mitigation and adaptation contribution, recognising the unique and more vulnerable nature of dryland forests

implementation policy must aim to create, restore and maintain connectivity and corridors between areas of dryland forests, expanding these areas into a ‘complete landscape’ to enable climate-driven species responses, resilience and continued provision of ecosystem services

incentivising and enabling community-based management of local ecosystems to build local ownership, adaptive capacity, ‘citizen-science’ monitoring, and resilience to climate change is required; and given the rate of environmental change, significant investments in IT infrastructure for real-time data gathering and monitoring are imperative