Assignment Three CBA Discussion
Online Learning: OL 341: Climate Change Adaptation: Design, Fund & Manage Projects
Center for Sustainable Development
https://csd-i.org/climate-change-adaptation-online-course/

This week’s resources:
Specialized Links to Adaptation Documents and Sites

Community-Based Adaptation Discussion Ideas

“The best CBA projects combine local knowledge with scientific knowledge”.
IIED: PLA Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change

“It’s is important to ensure that the proposed adaptation initiative is anchored with an ongoing baseline development effort”.
UNDP Designing Climate Change Adaptation Initiatives – Toolkit for Practitioners

Community Based Adaptation Discussion
This week we’re going to be looking at scientific studies that may give us evidence that a given activity/intervention works in solving an adaptation challenge.

Unfortunately, because adaptation projects are still relatively new, and community-based adaptation projects are even newer, not much has been published yet. Sometimes these scientific studies require years of observation in order to gather information.

However, if you go to the class homepage and look at CBA specific links in the left menu column you will find that I have posted the most relevant information that I’ve been able to find over the past few years.

https://ngo.csd-i.org/340-courses-folder/specialized-links-to-adaptation-documents-and-sites/

There are some great case studies that are full of ideas that may help you evaluate the ideas for activities that you came up with last week.

IIED Has published a recent book: Adaptation to Climate Change. The introductory chapter gives a great overview on the importance of creating a bridge between scientific evidence and indigenous knowledge; it’s very well written and I highly recommend that you read it. The link is posted on the adaptation to climate change page at the development community below.

One thing to consider however, is that adaptation activities are oftentimes indistinguishable from traditional development activities. For example, they can be traditional development activities focused on a CBA challenge such as adapting to a forest change in livelihood caused by changes in climate. Because of this, this opens up a whole new range of activities where we can look for scientific documents — randomized controlled trials and literature reviews — based upon traditional development activities that we can use for addressing adaptation challenges.

So the trick here is to temporarily re-frame the activities in your project outline that have been focused upon the adaptation facet of your project — into activities (for the purposes of this research assignment) that bear a resemblance to a traditional development activity.

If you can find scientific evidence that shows that this activity has worked to solve the challenge that you’re trying to solve from a development standpoint — you may well be able to create the argument that this can be used to solve the adaptation component in your project.

There are many ideas for activities for a range of different kinds of problems in the documents found in CBA Specific Links in the menu in the left column.

Good Luck!