Community-Based Adaptation Project

Project details

Recognizing that small communities are often the most severely affected, yet the least equipped to deal with the impacts of climate change impacts, the GEF council proposed that 10% of the resources under the Strategic Priority on Adaptation be channeled to community-based activities through the mechanism of the GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP) (document GEF/C.23/Inf.8/Rev.1, May 11, 2004).

In response, UNDP, in collaboration with SGP, has designed the CBA project to achieve the goal of reducing vulnerability and increasing adaptive capacity to the adverse effects of climate change in the focal areas in which the GEF works, building the resilience of communities, ecosystems, and resource-dependant livelihoods in the face of climate change.  The CBA project will accomplish this through the following objective and set of outcomes: 

The CBA represents the community-based component of the GEF Strategic Priority on Adaptation (SPA). The SPA is an ecosystem-based climate change adaptation fund, designed to support ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change, including variability. The CBA is a global project, implmented as a key component of UNDP-GEF's wider adaptation portfolio.

In addition, the CBA uses an innovative system for monitoring and evaluation, termed the Vulnerability Reduction Assessment (VRA). The VRA uses a system of question-based indicators to assess changes in community-level perception of their own capacity to adapt to changing climate, and forms an index. This focuses evaluation on the priorities of local stakeholders, and allows for monitoring and aggregating over a highly diverse range of countries, communities, and ecosystems while retaining locally specific information.

Country Drivenness

Country-drivenness is a key principle behind the CBA programme, and community-driven interventions are leveraged to contribute to national climate change adaptation priorities.  This is ensured through CBA National Coordinating Committees in each country, which consider CBA project proposals for approval based on criteria including technical feasibility, project quality, and consistency with national adaptation priorities. 

National Coordinating Committees are composed of various groups of national stakeholders, commonly including government representatives, UN system representatives, civil society, private sector, indigenous representatives, and other key stakeholders.  Consistency with national adaptation priorities is ensured in many countries through the inclusion of UNFCCC focal points:

News

Key results & output

The CBA programme seeks to enhance climate change adaptation capacities among communities in the pilot countries. This objective is be achieved through the following outcomes: 

• Enhanced adaptive capacity that allows communities to reduce their vulnerability to adverse impacts of future climate hazards; 
• National policies and programmes designed that include community adaptation priorities to promote replication, up-scaling and mainstreaming of best practices derived from CBA projects; and 
• Cooperation among member countries promoted for innovation in the design and implementation of adaptation to climate change including variability projects and policies.

Reports & publications

Videos & multimedia

CBA - Morocco Sees a Mix of Community Volunteers and UNV volunteers

Community-Based Adaptation Informational Video (2010)

Monitoring & evaluation

Monitoring and evaluation for community-based adaptation is a new field, and the CBA project is piloting innovative approaches to evaluating the success of locally-driven adaptation projects, and generating lessons to inform ongoing practice.

Key considerations in M&E for CBA include:

• Grounding M&E in the local context: M&E for CBA should avoid overly rigid frameworks, recognizing community heterogeneity and maintaining local relevance
• Capturing global lessons from local projects: CBA projects are highly contextualized, but lessons generated should be relevant to stakeholders globally
• Incorporation of both quantitative and qualitative indicators: to ground projects in tangible changes that can be objectively evaluated, and to capture lessons and case studies for global dissemination

To these ends, the CBA project uses three indicator systems: the Vulnerability Reduction Assessment, the SGP Impact Assessment System, and the UNDP Climate Change Adaptation Indicator Framework.

The Vulnerability Reduction Assessment (VRA)

The VRA is a question-based approach with the following aims:

• To make M&E responsive to community priorities
• To use M&E to make projects more accountable to local priorities
• To make M&E capture community ideas and local knowledge
• To gather community-level feedback to guide ongoing project management
• To generate qualitative information
• To capture lessons on specific issues within community-based adaptation
• To generate case studies highlighting adaptation projects

The VRA follows UNDP's Adaptation Policy Framework, and is measured in a series of meetings with local community stakeholders. In these meetings, locally-tailored questions based on standard VRA questions/indicators are posed, and the community assigns a numerical score on a 1-10 scale for each question. Progress is evaluated through changes in scores over the course of implementation, as well as through qualitative data collected in community discussions surrounding the exercise.

UNDP has developed a Users Guide to the VRA (Espanol) (Francais) as a tool to assist practitioners to conceptualize and execute VRA measurements in the context of CBA projects.

The structure of the VRA 

The SGP Impact Assessment System (IAS)

The CBA, being a project of the GEF Strategic Priority on Adaptation, aims to increase the resilience of ecosystems and communities to the impacts of climate change, generating global environmental benefits, and increasing their resilience in the face of climate change impacts. To this end, the CBA projects use the SGP's impact assessment system for monitoring achievements in GEF focal areas (focusing primarily on biodiversity and sustainable land management).

The IAS is composed of a number of quantitative indicators which track biophysical ecosystem indicators, as well as policy impact, capacity development and awareness-building.

UNDP Climate Change Adaptation Indicator Framework

CBA projects also track quantitative indicators from UNDP's adaptation indicator framework, corresponding to the thematic area on natural resources management. More information on UNDP's indicator framework can be found on the UNDP climate change adaptation monitoring and evaluation website.

Links

Newsfeed

Contacts