The Conference, which was organized around the theme “Scaling Up: Beyond Pilots," focused on the need to spread Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) knowledge and practical lessons horizontally across communities and vertically across levels of governance and action.
31 March 2011: The Fifth International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation (CBA), organized by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), took place in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 28-31 March 2010, around the theme “Scaling Up: Beyond Pilots.”
The Conference focused on the need to spread CBA knowledge and practical lessons horizontally across communities and vertically across levels of governance and action. Plenary and technical sessions covered topics such as: agriculture, local resilience and climate prediction services; communicating knowledge about CBA; bridging local, sub-national and national levels in adaptation; gender; health; funding and funding architecture; supporting adaptive capacity; the economics of CBA; CBA tools and toolkits; and synergies between disaster risk reduction (DRR), ecosystems, wider development projects and CBA.
Recurring issues raised at the Conference revolved around its theme of scaling up successful CBA projects. These issues included the importance of: understanding power-relations dynamics between genders, between local peoples, and between communities and other levels; incorporating youth and children into CBA project design and projects; communicating non-ambiguously with stakeholders at all levels; scaling meteorological prediction services down to levels more useful for dispersed rural populations; and integrating CBA with other developmental and environmental projects.
In a closing address, Rajendra Pachauri, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chair, stressed the need for greater global attention to adaptation issues, emphasizing the importance of scaling up, linking up and ensuring that adaptation experiences are shared broadly. He also underscored the need for: ensuring adaptation measures address vulnerability; increasing adaptive capacity; work on adaptation on the global and national levels, with action centered on local initiatives; rigorous analysis ensuring that efforts are taken in the right directions; inputs from outside the CBA community; local preparedness through incentives and regulation; mitigation; and the building of synergies among sectors, including the development and disaster prevention communities. [IISD RS Coverage] [Conference Website]