Locally Led Action Track

For more information or to get involved, please contact Cristina Rumbaitis Del Rio (Cristina.RdelRio@wri.org) and Saleemul Huq (saleemul.huq@icccad.net).

UPDATE: Learn about the Principles for Locally Led Adaptation, including the over 40 organizations that have endorsed them.

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While communities are at the frontlines of climate change impacts, they rarely have an effective voice in prioritizing, decision-making, and implementing the actions that most affect them. The Global Commission on Adaptation’s flagship report, Adapt Now, calls for increasing the volume of devolved and decentralized funding available to local governments, community-based organizations, and others working at the local level to identify, prioritize, implement, and monitor climate adaptation solutions. This is now even more important as local institutions are on the frontlines of responding to the COVID-19 crisis and its consequences, as well as the climate crisis.

The Commission is mobilizing a wide range of partners to achieve this goal by pursuing five main activities in the Year of Action.

1. Mobilize international funding for locally led adaptation

We aim to increase the quality and quantity of devolved climate finance. To mobilize commitments, we will engage funders and support them in expanding, strengthening, or creating new or planned initiatives on finance for locally led adaptation action. We will convene dialogues to bring grassroots leaders into conversations with donors as they design mechanisms to support locally led action.

2. Raise global ambition and establish foundational principles for locally led adaptation

To build upon and support the momentum already created on locally led action, we are bringing together a growing set of partners to endorse a set of principles for locally led adaptation for announcement at the Climate Adaptation Summit on January 25, 2021. Co-developed by civil society and grassroots organizations, funders and governments, these principles will serve as a foundation to guide effective and equitable adaptation and raise global ambition and priority for locally led action.  Through the process of engaging these diverse partners we hope to build political capital to develop an alliance of champions who would continue to support advocacy, accountability, and learning for locally led adaptation beyond the Year of Action.

Resources: Learn more about the Principles for Locally Led Adaptation and endorsing organizations.

3. Improve finance tracking and monitoring, evaluation, and learning to enable locally led adaptation

Recognizing the importance of iterative learning to support decentralized finance and decision-making, and to enhance our collective knowledge of effective models, we are working with partners to develop monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) guidance. This guidance will aim to support bottom-up learning and understanding of outcomes and effectiveness of locally led adaptation programs, and recognition of local knowledge and metrics of resilience. We are also assessing options for improved tracking of finance and finance decision-making to increase transparency and accountability of locally led action.

• Key 2021 deliverables: MEL guidance document and paper outlining finance-tracking options.
• Long-term target: Learning and tracking mechanisms exist to support donor and implementer capacity to monitor, plan, implement, innovate and evolve locally led adaptation practice by 2021.

4. Engage grassroots organizations

We will work with grassroots organizations and other partners to showcase the experience, knowledge and solutions that local leaders are pioneering to build resilience. Using a variety of mediums such as media, blogs, and video, we will leverage the platform of the Commission to help raise awareness of the imperative for locally led adaptation and evidence for effective and equitable adaptation strategies. We also will convene grassroots-donor dialogues to shape the design of more effective mechanisms to support locally led action, and consult with grassroots and local actors to shape the Action Track’s progress and deliverables.

5. Engage national government leadership for local action

We will identify barriers and solutions to enable governments to increasingly devolve climate adaptation funding. We will identify priority countries and provide them: 1) tools to support the devolution of climate funding; 2) knowledge products that fill information gaps; and 3) advocacy for increased public, private, and international funding for local adaptation actions. These efforts will give countries access to a network of partners that can help them better devolve climate funding and implement strategies for enhancing local community involvement in adaptation.