Community-based adaptation to climate change

IRIN: The impact of climate change is going to affect the poorest communities the most, so the focus has shifted to formalising community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change, which will help the poorest and most vulnerable" to access funding and information.

"Even with the best of intentions and lots of money being made available by the international community towards adaptation to climate change, it will only trickle down to the poorest and most vulnerable (as is our experience of development funding in general in the past)," said Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

But what is CBA to climate change? Huq explained by email that CBA is "still an 'aspirational' term that (we hope) will describe the universe of adaptation to climate change activities being done by very vulnerable and poor communities (mostly in developing countries but not necessarily only there) over time. We are still at a very early stage of developing the methodology and definitions."

…The focus is now on "clubbing" all community-based adaptation activities under the term "community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change", said Huq. "So it is still a work-in-progress to define CBA to Climate Change (as opposed to CBA to Climate Variability)." A CBA project looks much like any development project - for example, water harvesting in drought conditions rather than a stand-alone response to climate change - noted an IIED policy brief written by Huq. CBA to climate change is just another new layer added to other community-driven initiatives.

"The adaptation element introduces the community to the notion of climate risk and then factors that into their activities. This makes them more resilient, both to immediate climate variability and long-term climate change," said the IIED brief. "It should be noted, though, that the few existing CBA projects are so new that they have hardly been tested for resilience to climate variability, let alone to climate change."…

Tea Weighing Station located at the Chakva tea farm and processing plant just north of Batumi, close to the Black Sea coast Georgia. The Chakva farm and plant was one of the major suppliers of tea to all parts of the Russian Empire.Early color photograph from Russia, created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915.