Developing countries to share community-based adaptation experience

T.V. Padma in SciDev.net: Countries in Asia and Africa have formed an open and informal 'government group network' to help mainstream community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change and share knowledge and evidence gathered from projects.

The formation of the network was announced at the seventh international conference on CBA, which was opened in Dhaka last week (22 April) by Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.  "The focus is on sharing knowledge and evidence from government experience in mainstreaming CBA activities into national and local planning," said Saleemul Haq, senior fellow at the International Institute of Environment and Development, London, and director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Dhaka.

CBA focuses on innovative ways in which local communities deal with climate change impacts and integrate scientific and local knowledge in planning local adaptation strategies. This has evoked interest in climate scientists and development practitioners at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"The science of adaptation has made promising advances with the number of chapters on adaptation increasing steadily in successive IPCC reports," Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, said. "But the science of community-based adaptation is just emerging."...

A 2008 flood in Bihar, India, shot by Kumarrakajee, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license