Blog: Climate, Coaching, and Graduation – How are Members Approaching Climate Change in Their coaching work?
END ULTRAPOVERTY Roundtable
March 3, 2026
End Ultrapoverty: A Global Collaborative has been exploring the intersection of coaching and climate adaptation within Graduation programming – what are the possibilities for impact, what can we learn from each other, and what can we do to further work in this area. As part of this process, a few weeks ago, EUP came together for a round table discussion to get a better understanding about how members are approaching climate in their coaching work. Panelists were from AVSI, BRAC, Grameen Foundation, Women for Women, and Innovations for Poverty Action.
It has been well established that Graduation programs are well placed to support climate adaptation. Programs can help people prepare for climate shocks and reduce their vulnerability to shocks in three key ways: by supporting livelihood diversification, often reducing reliance on rain-fed agriculture, encouraging savings, and enhancing awareness, knowledge and skills to better prepare for future shocks.
At the same time, climate shocks and ecosystem degradation are reshaping the landscape in which Graduation programs operate, threatening hard‑won gains and increasing the risk that households fall back into extreme poverty after “graduating” (Hallegatte et al., 2016; World Bank, 2023). While programs offer important tools to buffer shocks and promote equity, most conventional efforts were not designed to include climate resilience or environmental conservation as core goals (Bowen et al., 2020).
“Because the environments that people are graduating into are changing really rapidly with compounding shocks… most conventional Graduation programs weren’t necessarily designed for climate resilience.” – IPA
Furthermore, existing evidence on how Graduation performs under intensifying climate and environmental stress and shocks is still thin.
Roundtable participants addressed these issues through discussing the following questions:
- What stage or phase is your organization at in terms of integrating climate into coaching?
- What is the core problem you’re trying to address or the question you’re trying to answer?
- What tools, curricula, or methods are you using or developing for climate-informed coaching?
- What lessons have you learned, what’s working well, and what are some ongoing challenges?
What We Learned
Why Climate and Coaching?
Coaching and mentorship have been identified as a natural, practical entry points for integrating climate information, helping participants identify local risks, and align livelihoods with nature-positive pathways. Coaching activities generally incorporate climate adaptation in three areas:
- Climate-informed content: Helping participants understand local risks.
- Business mentorship: Guiding participants to set goals aligned with energy use and/or environmental sustainability.
- Reinforcement: Community-based trainers with technical expertise (agriculture/animal husbandry) pair with social work coaches to provide specialized support.
“Climate energy or environmental considerations are considered as basic needs. And so they are embedded within our coaching pathways.”… “Integrating climate considerations into coaching leaves us with no option. It’s not optional, it’s essential to achieving the sustainable outcomes for Graduation.” – AVSI
“As long as we don’t deal with environment and climate related stress, we cannot achieve sustainable outcomes we envision for women we serve”…”What’s most important is for us to build women’s resilience, based on locally available materials, indigenous knowledge systems, and the adaptive capacities they already have.” -Women for Women International
Language matters
The term “climate change” is often too abstract for community-level engagement. Successful practitioners frame the conversation around natural disasters or specific shocks and stresses. Visual prompts and concrete local examples (e.g., photos of floods, drought) can stimulate conversation and shared understanding better than climate change as a general concept.
In addition, there are differences between the way that rural and urban communities perceive climate change. In rural settings, livelihoods are directly tied to the environment (agriculture). Participants are more aware of the immediate impact of weather shocks. In urban settings, participants often feel insulated from climate change unless it manifests as immediate weather shocks (flooding kiosks). However, they are indirectly affected by food price volatility driven by rural climate impacts.
Tools and and Methodology
Roundtable participants highlighted several tools used to co-create knowledge with communities:
- Seasonal calendars: Used to identify months of financial or water scarcity and migration patterns.
- Visual participatory exercises: Using images of climate shocks to prompt stories of local environmental changes over the last 10–15 years.
- “Resilient Life, Resilient Business“: A curriculum (Grameen Foundation) adapted from COVID-19 shock training to address climate-related stresses.
- Microplanning: Integrating climate awareness into productive asset selection (e.g., evaluating if goats or poultry is a “safe choice” for a specific environment).
- Self-reflection tools: Visual “stoplight” or “cap” tools for households to track their own progress in energy and environmental pathways.
“When you’re talking about adaptation, we are not talking about very technical and very high-fi kind of interventions, but we are talking about very low cost interventions which are suitable for that particular locality, which is suitable for a very poor household who can immediately make small changes to their day-to-day life. That can be done very easily.” – BRAC
Barriers and Challenges
Participants also identified several barriers to building sustainable climate resilience through coaching:
- Measurement & Cost – Environmental indicators (soil health, water availability, deforestation) are expensive and technically difficult to track alongside poverty metrics.
- Coach Capacity – Coaches are often social workers; they require significant technical upskilling or pairing with agricultural experts to be effective.
- Land Tenure – In refugee and extremely poor contexts, participants often do not own the land they use, limiting their ability to invest in long-term adaptations like agroforestry.
- Infrastructure – High investment costs for infrastructure (e.g., weather stations) are often wasted if there is no local capacity or budget for long-term maintenance.
- Language Barriers – Translating technical climate concepts from English to regional languages can lead to a significant loss of critical information.
The Collaborative is looking forward to continuing to explore key questions around coaching and climate.
- Integrated vs. Parallel Models: Is it more cost-effective to embed climate goals within a Graduation program, or to run separate, complementary environmental programs in the same geography?
- The Minimum Viable Package: What is the smallest, most feasible set of interventions that can successfully move the needle on both poverty and climate resilience?
- Long-term timelines: Are nature-positive livelihoods slower to show returns and do they require more intensive coaching than traditional models?
- Effectiveness of “green businesses”: Innovations like BOMA’s “Green Graduation” in Kenya are providing early insights, suggesting that “green” businesses (beekeeping, tree nurseries) can be as competitive as traditional models.
Poverty and climate change are inextricably linked. If Graduation implementers want to continue the progress we have made over the last several years in reducing rates of ultrapoverty, we must remain flexible in our approaches and think creatively about how to address climate at the same time. Perhaps most importantly, we need to build on local skills and knowledge and account first and foremost for the needs and knowledge of the communities in which we work.
Special thanks to roundtable panelists
Julie Kedroske, Facilitator (IPA), Isabella Genta (IPA), Bobbi Gray (Grameen), Upasana Joshi (BRAC), Joanita Nanyunga (AVSI), Robinah Nannungi, (AVSI)