This year’s Stories of Resilience focuses on the many ways in which local communities innovate to use the materials closest to hand and their own sweat and toil to adapt: from regenerating hillsides, coasts, degraded farmlands, and urban green spaces, to recycling waste into wealth. All of these contribute to creating greater resilience for people and nature.

In this year’s edition, we also bring you a crucial message from communities implementing adaptation on the ground: global and national systems are not changing fast enough in response to urgent local adaptation needs. Global and national policymakers and providers of adaptation finance “must do better” to activate transformational adaptation by creating the right enabling environments. The motivation and mobilization of communities can only go so far. They need governments, corporate, and multilateral actors to do their part. They need the patient, predictable and responsive funding that is one of the core principles of locally led adaptation to enable them to consolidate and upscale their hard work and talent.