In April, ACACIA teamed up with the CATER programme to hold an 11-day residential school in Nosy Be, Madagascar. This was the third intense and immersive CATER school, focussing this year on extreme weather and early warnings in the context of Madagascar.

Successfully implementing climate adaptation measures is considered a so-called “wicked problem“; this means – among other things – that it involves multiple sectors, disciplines, and ways of acting and knowing. Through our work in ACACIA and other projects, we’ve experienced that there is a need for people who can navigate these different contexts and landscapes. When people work in silos, it is incredibly hard to get anything useful done.

What characterises people with proficiency in this space is typically a curiosity about how other people work, think, and perceive the world. And it turns out that such people are plentiful! We received more than 300 applications for our school, so it was very hard to select 24 participants. We now think we made the right choices, because the 2026 cohort was stellar!

Mentioning but a few, we had Mathieu, a historian working on reconstructing past tropical cyclones in Madagascar, Kelvin, a climate and biodiversity governance expet from Kenya, and Sapna and Lonneke, who co-organised a session during the school on the concept of care in co-production.

The schedule was demanding, as the facsimile above shows. For us lecturers, one of the highlights was the daily plenary session led by the participants each morning. This also included flash presentations about their work, be it as practitioners or students.

But there was also time to relax and get to know each other. We went on a field trip to mangrive restoration areas on one of the first days, to a national park on the Saturday, and on the Sunday we had a day off. It is very clear that it is in these kinds of “third spaces” that a lot of the true learning occurs.

Next steps include sustaining the new relationships through the CATER alumni network, and potentially holding another CATER/ACACIA school in a few years!