Climate change and aid experts generally agree it's the poorest people who will be hardest hit by the effects of global warming. Many live in places where droughts, floods and storms are already frequent and severe. Crucially, they lack the resources to cope with these hazards, which are forecast to get worse as the planet heats up.

Developing countries have made clear they need more money, technology and research to help them adapt to climate change - a key demand in negotiations towards a U.N. global pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. But what we know much less about is the activities that are already underway to help vulnerable communities increase their own resilience to shifting weather patterns and rising seas.

These efforts - supported by a growing number of international and local aid groups - are known as community-based adaptation (CBA).

At an international conference in Bangladesh this week, more than 150 representatives of donor agencies, international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and research institutes from over 50 countries formed a coalition to promote climate change adaptation at the community level and to share knowledge about the best approaches.

But what exactly does community-based adaptation involve?

Conference participants had a chance to find out first hand, travelling to coastal areas in the south of the country to see how communities are dealing with floods and increasingly saline water, and to the drought-prone northwest.

WATER, RICE AND VEGETABLES

On the borders of the Sundarbans, South Asia's southern mangrove forests, people's drinking water is becoming saltier as the sea penetrates inland for several months each year. So aid agency Caritas has been helping people install receptacles on the roofs of their houses, schools and other community buildings to harvest rainwater.

And the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute has developed the country's first salt-tolerant, high-yielding rice variety, which is now being planted in these flood-prone coastal zones.

Women are also getting enthusiastic about floating vegetable gardens (baira), which they moor in canals next to their houses. The gardens are constructed from a bamboo frame on which water hyacinths are grown. Once they rot and die, their remains make a fertile vegetable bed. And when the floods come, the gardens simply rise with the water, keeping the women's crops out of harm's way.

As this briefing from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) explains, community-based adaptation is not about experts imposing complicated science or technical projects from the outside.

With CBA, aid workers first need to gain the trust of the poorest and most marginalised communities, communicate about climate change in a way (and language) they understand, and then work together to identify the most appropriate measures for them to adapt to weather and climate hazards. Only once NGOs have found out about traditional ways of coping are new activities, technologies and practices introduced.

REACHING THE POOREST

IIED fellow Saleemul Huq says the Global Initiative on Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change aims to generate knowledge that can inform international climate negotiations as well as development agencies' activities on the ground.

Existing U.N. agreements on climate change rarely touch on the rights of local communities, and discussions have only just begun on how a new global deal to tackle global warming might support action in impoverished villages.

"If we look at the funds for adaptation being discussed at international level, the underlying principle is that the poorest people will be impacted and they need resources," says Huq. "But we're not very clear as to how we reach those people. With this initiative, we can say, 'This is how.'"

Backers of the new coalition include IIED, Oxfam, ActionAid, environmental group WWF, CARE International, the Stockholm Environment Institute, Christian Aid, Caritas, the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies and the Development Fund of Norway.

The informal network will support conferences and workshops, as well as two websites - CBA-X and WeADAPT - and a Google Earth layer to share information and raise the profile of community-based adaptation. Members will also produce publications and videos, and organise training.

"Governments are being used as proxies for getting to the most vulnerable people, but they don't have a good track record," explains Huq. "Civil society and NGOs do, but climate change is new to them. So this is about how we bring development and climate change together at the grassroots level."

He says there is still much to learn, as community-based adaptation is still in its infancy. Experiences so far suggest one major challenge is how to bring longer-term climate projections into planning, which has tended to focus on climate problems in the here and now.

Yet the abstracts prepared for the Dhaka conference suggest that knowledge about and interest in community-based adaptation is growing fast. Besides papers about projects in Bangladesh, there is research on Vanuatu, the Philippines, Morocco, Nepal, Nigeria, Niger and Benin.

CREATIVE COMMUNICATION

The inhabitants of Benin's Low Oueme Valley, for example, find growing seasons are less predictable and surface water has decreased. This is due to changes in the local climate, but also population growth and growing industrial activity.

In response, farmers are planting fast-growing crops in dried-out areas of swamp forests to get a quicker harvest. Fishermen are using nets with finer mesh in drier rivers. And some people are using concrete pillars instead of local logs in construction, both conserving wood and making more flood-resistant buildings.

Local organisations make use of songs, proverbs and riddles to share knowledge about sustainable management of natural resources. A similar approach is being applied in other countries by CARE International.

"People's decisions need to be informed by the reality of climate change but the challenge is to make the information relevant and appropriate," CARE's Africa coordinator Angie Daze told AlertNet at December's U.N. climate talks in Poland. Her agency uses folk songs and drama to communicate with villagers about the impacts of global warming.

In Bangladesh, a traditional-style "pot song" is performed in courtyards to raise awareness about climate change through music and a colourful scroll which tells a story.

Here and in Ghana, Mozambique and Niger, CARE has brought together groups of men and women to discuss the local hazards they face. The top three are usually climate-related including droughts, floods and changing rainfall patterns, with participants often saying they can no longer grow good crops.

The exercise is an opportunity to talk about climate change and the future, analyse the risks and make decisions about how to tackle them.

"People are aware that things are changing, although they don't know it's a long-term trend, so it's really important to provide them with the information," explained Daze. "But climate change can be a scary issue if introduced in the wrong way."

Country negotiators crammed into sterile meeting rooms at U.N. climate talks - where the air is thick with impenetrable acronyms and jargon - would surely benefit from dipping a toe into the rising waters of community-based adaptation.

To see community-based adaptation in practice, try watching these videos on the CBA-X website.

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