Earth Today | A call to scale up community-based climate interventions
Published:Thursday | February 17, 2022 | 12:07 AM
AS CLIMATE CHANGE threatens to push another 35 to 122 million people into extreme poverty by 2030, there is a recommendation for a relook at community-based adaptation (CBA) efforts to ensure not only that they are locally led, but also that they are sufficiently resourced.
“Scaling local actions and CBA interventions will require real ambition, long-term commitment, and targeted mobilisation and deployment of resources, including devolved financing that reaches the poor and vulnerable in a flexible manner; a shift from technocratic solutions to prioritisation of people’s well-being, aspirations, and enhancing existing capacities through genuine collaborative processes that foster the inclusion of different types of knowledge,” notes a 2019 paper coming out of the Global Commission on Adaptation.
Adaptation refers to ecological, social or economic adjustments made to actual or expected climatic changes and their effects or impacts, including extreme weather events, sea level rise, and the ongoing warming of the planet. Interventions have included the design of early-warning systems, flood defences, switching to drought-resistant crops and redesigning communication systems, business operations and government policies. CBA is an approach to climate change readiness that encourages community-level leadership from design through to implementation of the intervention, as well as its monitoring. At the same, time it targets communities as a whole, utilising participatory processes to engage and empower, in particular, marginalised people and those living in poverty.
The paper – titled ‘Scaling local and community-based adaptation’ and authored by David Mfitumukiza, Arghya Sinha Roy, and others – notes further that the requirement for successful long-term CBA includes “proactively exploring the market opportunities that make local and community-based adaptation sustainable; and putting in place systematic monitoring and evaluation systems to understand the effectiveness of adaptation initiatives and facilitate learning at local level”.
Indi Mclymont-Lafayette, communications specialist with the Adaptation Programme and Financing Mechanism of the Pilot Programme for Climate Resilience, which supported a number of community-based adaptation interventions, agreed.
ADAPTATION
“It is critical for community-based adaptation to be locally led and sufficiently resourced. This ensures long-term buy-in, ownership and sustainability. However, there has to be space for capacity-building, as many times a barrier to successful implementation is that there may be limited local capacity,” she said.
“If local persons don’t have the skills to properly implement, then there will be maladaptation. For example, if a community is being introduced to aquaponics farming and they are trained to maintain the fish ponds and grow beds, but not how to market their produce, they may get discouraged and stop when the produce piles up and spoils. So providing the skill set along with the funding is crucial,” she added.
The paper adds, meanwhile, that there are a number of enabling factors that need to be taken on board, including the “integration of local knowledge and climate science”.
“Community-level, context-specific climate information must be generated, shared, and used to help households, communities, governments, and other stakeholders strengthen their understanding of climate risks and guide their adaptation decision-making across various scales,” says the 27-page document.
“Climate information is a critical enabling factor to the adaptation process, and systems are required to facilitate the appropriate use of climate information to inform bottom-up adaptation initiatives and support local-level action and CBA,” it adds.
At the same time, the paper cautions that while climate information that is relevant to the needs of community members can support decision-making, “it is critical to beware of how access and use of climate information is often affected by gender and other characteristics of one’s identity (e.g., age, educational status) that may preclude its inclusiveness or reach”.
“One must, therefore, ensure that such barriers are analysed and addressed, for example, through the use of intermediaries that seek to overcome such power differentials,” it says.
Ultimately, the paper says, “local action and community-based adaptation is process-oriented and requires time, especially to develop or strengthen trusting relationships among a range of stakeholders at different levels and across multiple sectors that are needed for them to succeed”.
“Thus, support is needed in all phases of the adaptation process: visioning, planning, implementation, and monitoring, evaluation and learning. While significant progress has been made in many countries in advancing adaptation planning by adopting participatory approaches, a crucial gap remains in aligning such planning with longer-term visioning and with government (especially local government) planning processes,” the paper states.