Adaptation, or adaptive responses, to climate change come in a range of approaches from technological (e.g. sea walls), to managerial (e.g. crop diversification), to policy frameworks (e.g. planning regulations).

While developed counties tend to have technological capacity and the strategic capability to anticipate the impacts of low-to- mid levels of global warming, developing countries not only face more extreme impacts but also have less capacity to reduce climate risk and vulnerability. This is especially true in the poorest communities. There are “formidable environmental, economic, informational, social, attitudinal and behavioural barriers to the implementation of adaptation,” and for developing countries, because the impacts are inevitable, building adaptive capacity is particularly important.

Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) is an innovative approach that focuses on enabling communities to enhance their own adaptive capacity, and empowering vulnerable communities to increase their own resilience to the impacts of climate change. It focuses on enabling a community to identify and implement actions that will alleviate or respond to the negative impacts of increasing climate variability and change in order to maintain human security and enhance levels of social and economic development. These actions should not contribute to climate change and should conserve the ecological, social and cultural sustainability of the community.

Some examples of CBA projects can be found on the Practical Action website here: http://practicalaction.org/?id=climatechange_adaptation