Community-based adaptation in Nepal

IRIN: The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal has become one of the first countries to consider scaling up community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change and making it part of national development policy. Nepal is vulnerable to rising global temperatures and has already been dealing with the impact of erratic rainfall, frequent droughts and floods, which have been affecting food security. In response the country decided to experiment with a bottom-up approach using Local Adaptation Plans of Action, or LAPAs, in 10 districts across the country in 2010.

In a joint paper on local adaptation plans, Bimal Raj Regmi, a researcher, and Gyanendra Karki, a government official, said the idea of drawing up LAPAs came out of the National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA) process. They noted that Nepal, as one of the last of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to develop its NAPA, was able to incorporate elements omitted from the adaptation plans of other countries.

These include better links to climate change planning processes and mainstreaming national adaptation goals down to the local level, so that the NAPA process moved beyond regional and national consultation to include the input of vulnerable communities in the LAPAs.

The LAPAs are developed by people from various sectors in a village or district who identify local climate risks, vulnerability and needs, and focus on increasing resilience based on the geographical location and assessments made by the community using their knowledge of the local environment. "This is particularly critical because if communities are unable to distinguish climate change risks from other risks they face, then efforts to develop adaptive capacity might become unfocused or ineffective," said Regmi and Karki….

The Karnali River in Nepal, shot by filippo_jean, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license