Assignment Two Discussion
Online Learning: OL 343 Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change: The Community Focus.
Center for Sustainable Development
https://csd-i.org/ol-343-the-community-focus/

Assignment Two. Are our CBA activities linked to a changing climate?
Comparing our project’s challenge to the challenges local evidence is revealing.

Using our research from last week, we will now have the opportunity of looking closely at our CBA program of activities that we developed in our original project. One of three things can result from this. First, our original (341, 342) project activities will do a good job of addressing the challenges that we discovered in the assignment last week. Or, secondly, they will do a good job of addressing these challenges with minor modifications — or with the addition of another activity or two.

Or, thirdly, we might discover that we are off by a mile with our early CBA program. We might have developed our first program for adapting to flooding — when indeed we some learned last week that flooding isn’t a challenge that we need to be concerned about — but that drought is.

So this week is your chance to perfect the CBA element of your original project. We won’t make any modifications to the traditional development activities (hand washing, micro-enterprise, whatever) of the project. Over these next two courses, 343 and 344, we will be focusing most specifically on the CBA aspect of your project — but this does not deny the validity of the rest of your project. Your community may be depending on the rest of your project — and so you need to keep it intact to maintain their sense of ownership and trust. We also learned last week that CBA activities seem to be somewhat inseparable from traditional development components of projects.

If you joined this course from another class where you did not include CBA activities into your project — this is the perfect time to include one. Don’t be too concerned about how absolutely perfect your new activities are — we will be refining them and cleaning them up over the next few weeks.

As usual, please don’t make your modifications or additions overly complex. Complex projects in the context of this course tend to take over your thought processes and may cause you to lose focus on what the course is trying to teach. I would prefer that you work with a simpler project — and if you have more complex components within your project — that you maintain those outside of the course in a parallel fashion.

Simpler projects are easier to fund and manage. In the last section of 342, one student reported in the assignment six meeting with a donor, that the donor said that he was trying to take on too much and that he should simplify his project. Another student presented his project to his boss said the same thing — but not in such a nice manner!

I’ve posted a link to ‘300 CBA activities’ — they should give you some good ideas of project activities if you get stuck. However, I’m also hoping that with the good research that you do in the good ideas that you have that we can make this list into “400 CBA activities”!

I look forward to seeing your work this week — please move on to Assignment 3.

Sincerely,

Tim Magee