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Adaptation strategies must be

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T here are two major outcomes and messages on

adaptation to climate change that have been mentioned in
the recently published Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of
Working Group II (WG2) of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). The first one says that the impacts $৩$ঘ#া$আেগ J %&&" %!'(")
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of climate change are evident all around the world—in both
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poor countries and rich—necessitating a much enhanced
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investment in adaptation measures to be better prepared
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and investments that have been undertaken, a significant
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News channel.

While there are many reasons for these past failures, a

major reason is that almost all those investments for
adaptation were done in a top-down way, where experts
came up with the plans and the local communities, who
were the supposed beneficiaries or even targets of this
support, were merely made to implement what they were
told to.

This was not only an extremely disempowering manner of

dealing with the local communities, but also a mistake to
ignore their own lived experiences and the experiential
knowledge that they had on how best to adapt to the
climate change hazards they had been facing.

This has led to a global movement to promote what is now

called Locally Led Adaptation (LLA), and there are eight
principles that over 50 global institutions, multilateral
development banks, bilateral donor agencies and even a
number of countries have adopted. The main principles
include: consulting local communities before designing the
interventions to be funded; involving those communities in
implementing the plans; and having the communities
themselves monitor and assess the effectiveness of such
investments.

However, merely signing a pledge is not enough, if the

practice doesn't change on the ground. Hence the annual
Gobeshona conference on Locally Led Adaptation and
Resilience has become a venue for monitoring and
evaluating the performance of the financiers and agencies
supporting adaptation around the world.

The Gobeshona conference on LLA and Resilience, which

was held online for the first time in 2021, has now become a
global event where the institutions who have signed the
LLA principles will be invited each year to share what they
are doing in practice, and particularly bring the local
adapters from around the world to share their experiences.
Before, the conference was held in person, in Bangladesh.

The second annual Gobeshona conference on LLA is also

scheduled to be held online, from March 27 to April 1, with
a focus on connecting the local adapters to global decision-
makers, keeping an eye on the upcoming 27th UN Climate
Change Conference (Conference of Parties—COP27), set to
be held in Egypt in November 2022.

The opening session on March 27 will be hosted by

Bangladesh, and there are over 80 sessions already
scheduled over the next six days. These sessions are set to
be hosted and organised by different organisations and
groups from around the world, and participants can join
any sessions they wish to attend online—completely free of
cost. Each session is aimed at finding a message for the
upcoming COP27, and in the final session on April 1, the
high-level climate champions for COP26 and COP27 will be
interviewed. We will share the messages from the local
adapters with the high-level climate champions and ask
them how they can ensure that these messages actually
influence the global decisions that are going to be made at
COP27.

This annual conference, hosted and organised by the

International Centre for Climate Change and Development
(ICCCAD), is now aimed at becoming a standing item in
terms of monitoring and evaluating the performance of the
national and international agencies that are supporting
adaptation activities around the world. It is expected to
become as important an event as the UN climate summit. It
will be able to track and monitor the actual
implementations of LLA on the ground.

Dr Saleemul Huq is the director of the International Centre

for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) at the
Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).

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