CBA18 Conference: Local Solutions Inspiring Global Action – Updates and Key Messages

About

The CBA18 conference is taking place on 6-9 May 2024 in Arusha, Tanzania. It aims to bring together a community of practitioners who are collectively seeking to reimagine solutions that enable transformative outcomes, through the agency of communities driving climate action.

CBA is a space for the adaptation community to share learning on community-based and locally led adaptation systems, and to explore how to put the principles for locally led adaptation (LLA) into practice, recognising the complexities, innovations and challenges that must be overcome.

The conference is inviting participants to think critically and creatively on how to ‘decolonise climate action’ and promote ‘locally-led innovation and adaptation’.

This year will be a special one to remember the CBA conference founder, Dr. Saleemul Huq, who passed away on 28 October 2023. 

Key conference updates

Day 2 – 7 May 2024

On Day 2, discussions and sessions focused on how to decolonise Climate Action, enabling gender-transformative locally led adaptation, Indigenous knowledge and more.

The day started with an ‘inspire’ session: four speakers delivered quick-fire comments on what they have learned about getting climate finance to the local level.

• Dominic Nyasulu of the National Youth Network on Climate Change in Malawi spoke about transparency and accountability. He argued that the many-layered funding chain, stretching from global funders through a range of intermediaries to communities at the local level, is a barrier to clear communications and reporting. 
• Eileen Cunningham from CAPDI called for better collaboration, particularly with Indigenous Peoples. Climate change is critically affecting Indigenous communities and cultures. She said the system must be transformed as it is also preventing resources from getting to the local level.
• Zahid Amin Shashoto from Bangladesh NGO Uttaran spoke passionately about how a system that was “so locked” made it difficult to practise the LLA principles. He said: “We’ve got so used to following a system that we’ve forgotten that we have the freedom to do things differently.” 
• Shashoto called for all processes – due diligence, monitoring and evaluation – to be moved to the local level and for communities to be able to use their own tools and methods for undertaking them. 

Day 1 – 6 May 2024

Over 350 participants, from over 120 countries representing over 180 organisations are gathered in Arusha for the 18th International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change (CBA18). In the opening plenary, the main conference organisers, Tanzania People and Wildlife and the International Institute for Environment and Development welcomed all the delegates. It was officially opened by the Government of Tanzania.

Check out the IIED website for updates on the following sessions and topics:

• Making climate finance accessible for locally-led actions
• Heat hacks: building community resilience to beat the heat together!
• Plenary: How do we operationalise the locally led adaptation (LLA) principles?
• Discussing the challenges of implementing locally led adaptation