CBA10: Enhancing urban community resilience

By Bob Aston

The 10th International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation (CBA10) will take place in Dhaka, Bangladesh on April 22-28, 2016. This year’s theme “Enhancing urban community resilience” looks back over 10 years of CBA conferences for a retrospective evaluation as previous conferences have focused on rural communities.

The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) is organizing the conference in association with the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), and the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).

Some participants during one of the CBA9 session.PHOTO/Adaptation Fund

CBA10 aims to share and consolidate the latest developments in community-based adaptation practices, policy, and theory across sectors globally. Others include capturing and disseminating the knowledge and experience more broadly to CBA10 participants and through online web coverage and conference proceedings.

It aims to strengthen the existing network of practitioners, policymakers, planners and donors working on all levels of community-based adaptation, and enhance the capacity of practitioners, governments and donors to help improve the livelihoods of those most vulnerable to climate change.

The CBA10 conference will begin on the morning of 25 April. The three-and-a-half-day conference will include plenary and parallel interactive sessions, hands-on learning approaches, group discussions, high-level speaker panels, video competitions, and poster presentations.

Optional CBA10 field visits will take place over three days ahead of the CBA10 conference, with a welcome and briefing dinner on 21 April.  The participants will visit CBA projects in different ecosystems across Bangladesh, such as drought, flood-prone, forest, and urban areas.

IIED and partners such as BCAS, created the CBA conferences to highlight that effective adaptation to climate change takes place at community level. Past CBA conferences have focused on scaling up best practices, ensuring a scientific basis to action, communicating and mainstreaming CBA, and ensuring adaptation funding reaches community level.

A bottom-up approach to adaptation enables sharing of local knowledge and practices among communities, academics, and project managers so that those most exposed to the impacts of climate change are better able to adapt.

The previous conference, CBA9 “Measuring and Enhancing Effective Adaptation” which took place in Nairobi, Kenya in April 2015, concluded with the launch of the Nairobi Declaration on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change, which stated the importance of addressing the needs and interests of the poorest and most vulnerable in international agreements on sustainable development, development finance and climate change.

Community-based adaptation to climate change focuses on empowering communities to use their own knowledge and decision-making processes to take action. Increased interest in CBA has led to significant growth in number of actions by different actors as well as greater level of synergy around CBA.