This month, CDKN publishes a new journal article in Climate and Development, identifying a series of enabling factors to help scale out community based adaptation. Drawing on four case studies based on CDKN supported work in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the article shows that there is no single path towards scaling out community based adaptation; rather, a number of broad enabling strategies can be relied upon depending on the local context.

In Cartagena, a coastal Columbian city of 900,000, the collaboration between the city government, NGOs, a well-established research institute and local businesses, has fed into a better understanding of climate impacts, and helped develop integrated planning mechanisms building upon the strengths of various players on the ground.journal article In Bangladesh, the establishment of countrywide networks and platforms promoting locally based evidence on community based adaptation, has significantly increased practitioners' exposure to and ability to learn from other successful examples, making Bangladesh one of the world's pioneering countries as regards climate adaptation. In Mozambique, Ethiopia and Uganda, the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance, a network of research partners and NGOs, is seeking to better understand the core components of adaptive capacity, helping to move community based adaptation past the pilot stage, and to spur mainstreamed adaptation planning. In Zambia finally, the large scale community-based agroforestry programme recently launched by Dunavant Zambia Ltd,  the country's largest cotton transformation company, in partnership with a specialist NGO, demonstrates how beyond government-led action,  a wide range of institutional  arrangements can be adopted for scaling out community based adaptation.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Climate and Development on 23/06/2014, available online on http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17565529.2014.918869/ If you liked this, why not read… - CDKN's working paper on how to scale out community based adaptation  - CDKN's report on subnational strategies for climate compatible development

Image 'Portraits of a Woman', courtesy of CIFOR (Flickr).