By 2050, up to 5% of Africa’s population of some 2 billion people could be on the move due to climate impacts, up from 1.5% today. For people facing climate stressors, climate mobility is likely to be a response of last resort – most Africans are attached to their land and homes, and don’t aspire to leave their communities.

Bottlenecks hinder uptake of climate change data, specially by local institutions and actors for which adaptation is a priority, condemning the data to the valley of death. The steps of access (to data); usability (of information); governance (of knowledge); and politics (of wisdom) provide a foundation for building a bridge between scientific results and their societal use, especially at the local level. 

The case of Accra demonstrates that increased preparedness (involving individuals, households, and institutions) is required to enhance adaptation to flood events, rather than the current top-down response approach.

What should future cities look like? Cities in the Global South often emulate cities in the Global North when it comes to imagining the future, but the applicability of that model to cities in South East Asia is disputable.

This guide showcases 13 investment-ready delivery mechanisms from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific and offers insights on how funders and implementing entities can scale up investment for LLA.

Every dollar invested in locally led adaptation could yield up to US$ 87 in benefits. When social costs are considered, the returns could be as high as 400%. For a deep dive on LLA in Africa, read the Chapter on LLA in GCA’s State and Trends in Adaptation Report 2022.

Challenges on both the demand and supply side of climate finance make it difficult for local organizations to access climate finance. A consultative process launched to feed into the design of small grants sought to explore how best the grants can reach local organizations and build climate resilience. 

If international actors are to live up to their rhetoric of supporting locally-led development, they must learn to see from the perspectives of their counterparts in the Global South.

Climate change is disrupting traditional values and the close relationship that the fisherfolk of Gwadar, Pakistan, have with their environment. This disruption, in turn, is deepening poverty and political instability in the region.

Examples of approaches to investing in and implementing Locally Led Adaptation, to demystify the steps funders and governments can take to operationalize and scale adaptation in line with the LLA Principles.

A 2021 review found that only 46% of finance committed from international sources for climate adaptation was intended to give agency to local actors. Of this amount, there was little evidence of local actors fully leading adaptation interventions.

Community-based aquaculture projects in a locally managed marine area in Madagascar provided small-scale fishers with alternative income streams to ease the pressure faced by fishing communities such as declining fish stocks and climate change. This research shows that participants accepted the new governance model which involved changing open access to private access because of the benefits – such as more predictable income generation, and benefit-sharing across the community.

Agricultural production in Bangladesh is affected by salinity increase, water logging, and land erosion caused by sea level rise, and this is resulting in increased economic vulnerability. However, existing measures that are designed without considering local context, existing community-led adaptations, and local perceptions do not target the needs of coastal communities.

This research explores locally led responses to climate change in Thai Binh, Vietnam. It argues that climate adaptation should provide an opportunity to question developmentalist values that drive unsustainable relationships to nature. The paper explores 'surviving well' in the context of climate interventions in Thai Binh and how local responses adapt and listen to non-human entities, highlighting how this could inspire non-exploitative relationships to the environment.

This paper aims to understand how citizen participation in climate adaptation is governed in Norrkoping, Sweden, and how this impacts local capacity for transformative climate adaptation. It found that path-dependencies in past and contemporary governance of climate adaptation, and citizen participation were a barrier to transformative climate adaptation. To counteract this, the paper suggests the following to better enable citizen participation in climate adaptation: broadening the geographical boundaries of deliberations; redefining the target groups; co-designing participation targets, approaches and evaluation; and developing new ways to analyze and act on the patterns in the citizen inputs received.

This paper argues that area-based approaches (ABA) to disaster response is key in strengthening people-centered recovery and local resilience. It utilizes four principles to review recovery efforts in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu: people-centered responses, adaptive processes, multi-sector collaboration and reflective practice. The research gathered data through a literature review and key informant interviews. Despite finding examples of community leadership and locally tailored social protection schemes, it concludes that significant progress can be made to address common problems such to ensure projects are contextually grounded and are coordinated with other efforts. 

This report is based on a summary of regional dialogues held in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean. The discussions took place between September and October 2021, bringing together civil society, the private sector and government representatives. The events aimed to recognize arising challenges and lessons when implementing locally led adaptation projects and to use this knowledge to inform scaling LLA. The dialogues showcased 11 cases of LLA in practice and discussions revolved around funding, decision-making, the value of local knowledge, social inclusion and more.

This paper explores the grassroots initatives through three case studies in Bangladesh, an informal settlement in the Philippines and Vanuatu. It argues that LLA proves to be an equitable, effective and sustainable approach to adaptation and proposes nine drivers of LLA that focus on empowering local actors to design their own adaptation pathways to improve grassroots initiatives.

This paper highlights the need to not only address the scarcity of good quality climate data in many places in the world but also to embed this into a broader climate services ecosystem, demonstrating how this has been achieved through the Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initative.

The Indigenous Fijian (iTaukei) women have skills, knowledge, and unique local and traditional experience that can increase the resilience of the community, but face barriers that prevent them from contributing to decision-making in the community. Interventions that are culturally accepted and support the role of women in decision-making are necessary.

Understanding social norms and power dynamics at the local level needs time and resources that current project life cycles rarely allow. This research, based on the Devolved Climate Finance mechanism implemented in Tanzania, finds that community power dynamics and social identities must be integral parts of programming to ensure that the trade-offs between (and within) resilience and well-being dimensions do not lead to maladaptation.

Since the quality and quantity of finance for LLA is systematically tracked this paper provides metrics that governments can use to assess LLA finance and how well it supports local agency and decision-making. The analysis is based on adaptation tracking and financing in nine countries, literature reviews and expert consultations. Suggested tracking and reporting systems include budget tagging, expenditure reviews and integration with policy processes such as the National Adaptation Plan (NAP).

Forest cover in Nepal has nearly doubled from 1992 to 2016, from 26 percent to 45 percent, thanks to community management of forests. The devolution of forest management in the country has proved to be a great success, conserving and regenerating forests while providing communities fruits and medicines, regenerated land for grazing, and fuelwood. Community forests now occupy nearly 2.3 million hectares—about a third of Nepal’s forest cover—and are managed by over 22,000 community forest groups with 3 million households.

A literature review conducted on over 70 evaluation materials suggested that although local actors are involved in adaptation interventions, they are often not included in the decision-making surrounding the finance design and implementation. The paper concludes that efforts to increase LLA should focus on encouraging flexible approaches to program design and including local actors in decision-making from start to finish.

Locally led change in the Pacific might be instructive and help to build a broader and deeper repository of knowledge for a post-development conceptualisation of social change in which local, pluralist and solidaristic initiatives are central, and where connections to place, local knowledge and the non-human are highly valued.