Establishing Southern-based collaborations to enhance locally-led adaptation and resilience

The impacts of global climate change threaten societies, economies and ecosystems differently with varied magnitude, intensity and interact with other risks. In the era of climate emergency, deep-rooted poverty and rapid biodiversity destruction, the poorest and the most marginalized communities suffer the most, thanks to the historical injustice and marginalization. In order to compensate for the historical injustices and exclusion in the face of a changing climate, the local actors must be brought at the front seat to take part in locally-led adaptation with utmost power to decide on their own adaptation measures. 

Local actors are the people, communities and institutions at the frontline dealing, facilitating and implementing climate change adaptation measures. Locally-led adaptation goes beyond delivering adaptation benefits at the local level or getting local people to participate in a project. It is rather about them having individual and collective agency over selecting, designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating adaptation measures. It calls for ensuring indigenous knowledge and cultural practice making the adaptation measures an integral part of their regular life. Therefore, an effective locally-led adaptation measure requires a whole-of-society approach having public, private, civil society and community stakeholders working together for a collective gain despite having varying interests, vulnerabilities and capacities. 

The onset of the global pandemic has once again revealed the capabilities of local actors in building resilience against all odds and thereby paved the way for a radical shift in local voice and agency. It has particularly highlighted the role of women in building community resilience during an unprecedented crisis. To recover from the adversities posed by Covid-19 and to achieve resilience against climate change, actions must move away from business as usual. 

To cater to the global need for promoting locally-led adaptation resilience, in this year’s Annual Gobeshona Global Conference 2020, held from January 18-24, ICCCAD adopted locally-led adaptation and resilience as the main theme of the conference. It realizes that despite making important contributions in adaptation and generating useful experiential climate knowledge, locally driven data and information are still not widely used in decision making due to concerns about usability and legitimacy. Closing the usability gap between knowledge generators and users requires a systematic knowledge exchange and collaboration among stakeholders. Once such a way to exchange knowledge effectively across a wide range of users is through “peer-to-peer learning”. Peer-to-peer learning is a powerful tool to exchange experience and learning on climate change adaptation and resilience and foster collaboration at all levels. 

Years of work on climate change adaptation and resilience has generated a vibrant community of academics and non-academics in the global south. This community has an annual cycle of key touch points that include the Community Based Adaptation (CBA) Conference, the Gobeshona Conference and the Development and Climate (DandC) Days. These events allow this community of practice to come together with tremendous energy at regular intervals, build new relationships, and work together on new ideas. For example, the annual Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) Conference held in a different country each year has been very successful at bringing several hundred people from around the world. Similarly, the annual Gobeshona Conference, each year held in Bangladesh, creates a platform for researchers, practitioners and policymakers to share research, knowledge and experiences on climate change issues across Bangladesh. 

From 2021, Gobeshona has gone global and now it hosts a wide range of academics and practitioners around the world. The annual Development and Climate (DandC) Days are held each year in the middle weekend of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and bring together practitioners, negotiators, scientists and policymakers to explore key issues related to adaptation to climate change in developing countries. However, establishing continuity within projects, ideas or relationships established during such events has proven to be difficult.

In order to foster continuity between relevant conferences, and mobilize collaborative and trans-disciplinary teams of academics and non-academics from the global south, ICCCAD together with Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) and Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF) initiated the Small Grants Program from the Gobeshona Global Conference 2021. The program aims at creating greater sustained collaboration among southern-based groups through targeted grants to promote locally-led adaptation and resilience. Total five grants each worth $5000 will be given to the top five groups through this program.

The process started with a selection of interested candidates through an open call. With an overwhelming number of responses, a preconference networking session was held which helped facilitate the group formation. Based on the concepts notes submitted, top 5 groups were selected through a two-step process. In step one, the organizing team selected top 10 groups based on predetermined criteria such as diversity, gender balance, youth inclusion and inclusion of LDC based members. In the final step, an online voting took place to select the top five winning teams. Within less than 24 hours, a whopping 1600 votes were received highlighting the amount of interest grown among the audience. 

The selected groups are currently working on their project and will continue to do so by the end of this year. They will report back in the 15th Community Based Adaptation Conference (CBA15) and Development and Climate Day in COP26 on November 2021. The final results will be shared during the 2nd Gobeshona Global Conference in 2022. The organizing team seeks to hold the same programme in 2022 as well to continue creating greater sustained south-south knowledge exchange and collaboration. 

Shahrin Mannan is working in ICCCAD as a Senior Research Officer. Her research interest lies in locally-led adaptation, gender and climate change, and sustainable development.