What are the GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards?

Launched by GCA in 2022, the Local Adaptation Champions Award spotlight and reward innovative, exemplary, inspiring, and scalable locally led efforts that address the impacts of climate change and build effective climate resilience among the most vulnerable communities, sections of society, and individuals who are at the frontlines of the greatest existential threat faced by humankind.

The award is open to any individual, organization or group of partners worldwide, who are in the process of implementing climate change adaptation/resilience solutions that follow one of the eight principles for locally led adaptation.

If you represent an organization or a group of partners, make sure to request permission to submit an application on their behalf to be considered for this award.

The call for applications will be open from 10th June to 10th July 2022.

Four winners (one per category) will receive a cash prize of €15,000. The 20 award nominees will benefit from media coverage around their nomination for the awards.

You will be asked to provide:
1. A short description (300 words)
2. Photos or infographics
3. A video of 2 minutes or less.
Use your creativity to build your case. Show, don’t tell.
Remember: we want to hear your story. Please refrain from copying and pasting intervention design documents. Instead, use your voice and the voices of those who have benefited from your solution to tell us what you did, how you got there and what difference it has made.

Anything shorter than 2 minutes that will help us get a better sense of your achievement: interviews with community members who have benefitted from your intervention or solution, footage of the proposed solution in action, etc. We are not looking for high-quality, polished videos. A video taken with your cellphone camera will do. What’s important is that it contributes to your story and that it gives us a glimpse of the impact of your work. The video should not exceed 30Mb.
 
If you make it to the top 20 nominees for the awards, we may request permission to use your video as part of our promotional campaign for the awards. Please ensure you seek permission from those appearing in your video before filming them and sending us the footage.

Similarly, we are not looking for professional and high-definition photos or graphs. Rather visual elements that will illustrate your short descriptive text and be complementary to the 2-minute video. Photos can show people (beneficiaries of your solution, or the team who designed or implemented the intervention), products or materials, villages or landscapes. They can showcase a situation before and after your initiative was put in place, or show the evolution of your intervention, or of your work. In case you add infographics, those can show processes, maps, diagrams – anything that will help the overall understanding of your intervention. There is no limit in terms of the number of photos and/or graphic elements to add to your application.

If you make it to the top 20 nominees for the awards, we may request permission to use your photos or infographics as part of our promotional campaign for the awards. Please ensure you seek permission from those appearing in your photos before taking their picture and sending us the footage.

Yes. You can apply in the language of your choice, provided that you include a transcript or subtitles for your videos in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese. Please bear in mind that text submitted in a language other than those listed above will be machine translated, a process that may entail loss of meaning and inaccuracies.

You cannot fill out the form offline, but you can download a copy to prepare your answers. You can also start and come back later to continue filling it out, provided that you use the same computer and browser. Once submitted, you will not be able to make changes to your application.

No. You cannot submit more than one application for the same intervention, even if you feel it can fit into more than one category. Please choose one category and make sure you are the only person in your organization or group of organizations that is submitting an entry.

Yes. If you manage several eligible interventions, you may submit an application per intervention.

The eight principles for locally led adaptation, are defined as follows:

• Principle 1 – Devolving decision-making to the lowest appropriate level.
• Principle 2 – Addressing structural inequalities faced by women, youth, children, disabled and displaced people, indigenous peoples and marginalized ethnic groups. 
• Principle 3 – Providing patient and predictable funding that can be accessed more easily.
• Principle 4 – Investing in local capabilities to leave an institutional legacy. 
• Principle 5 – Building a robust understanding of climate risk and uncertainty. 
• Principle 6 – Flexible programming and learning. 
• Principle 7 – Ensuring transparency and accountability. 
• Principle 8 – Collaborative action and investment.

Solutions which address drivers of vulnerability (actions that enable people to have livelihoods and levels of wellbeing with low sensitivity to climate shocks and stressors) include:

• Solutions which confront climate impacts, managing risk upfront (high adaptation)
• Solutions which help people to better anticipate and adapt, and reduce impact of hazards (medium adaptation)
• Solutions which reduce vulnerability to climate change, increase coping capacity of systems (resilience)

To be eligible for the award, applicants must ensure that:

• The solution addresses climate change impacts or builds effective climate resilience.
• The solution aims at the most vulnerable communities, sections of society and individuals experiencing climate impacts (shocks and slow-onset).
• The entry matches the description of one of the four award categories.
• The intervention presented is under implementation and shows results and impact.

Winning entries will have to show that they are indeed effective and have impact. It may be too early for your intervention to be considered for the 2022 award but make sure to document your work as you go along and save it for next year’s edition!

Yes. If you can make a compelling case that the people you have been working with have been able, as a result of your action, to build resilience or adapt to climate change, and if your intervention follows one of the eight principles of locally led adaptation, then you are welcome to submit an entry.

Applications will be screened against a set of pre-defined criteria after the closing of the call for applications. The top 20 applicants will be nominated for the awards and requested to provide additional information to support their entry. After further screening by a Technical Advisory Group composed of locally led adaptation experts, the winners will be selected by the Jury.

Technical Advisory Group composition
Members of the Technical Advisory Group include:

• Abul Kalam Azad, Former Special Envoy, CVF Presidency, Bangladesh
• Anna Ballance, United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
• Shehnaaz Moosa, South South North, South Africa
• Susan Nanduddu, ACTADE, Uganda
• Anju Sharma, Global Center on Adaptation (GCA)

Jury composition
Members of the high-level Jury will be announced shortly.

Nominees will be requested to provide evidence to support their entry and will have one week to provide such evidence. Delays in providing the requested documentation will result in disqualification from the award process.

Nominees who send in their supporting documents will be listed on the GCA website and invited to feature their work on the GCA new LLA Knowledge Hub.

Conflict of interest is generally recognized as a situation where there is risk that a professional judgment or decision could be influenced by some secondary interest. In the context of GCA Awards Team, GCA Technical Advisory Group members and the Jury (hereafter the GCA Selection Committee), conflicts of interest may derive from a Committee member’s relationship with a nominee and/or affiliation with a nominee’s institution. To avoid the appearance of any impropriety, members of the GCA Selection Committee will adhere to the following guidelines.
 
If conflicts of interest are identified, the conflicted committee members will recuse themselves from discussions related to the corresponding nominations. Recusal means that the GCA Selection Committee member will refrain from any commentary or input regarding the conflicted nomination before or during the decision-making process, and will absent him/herself during committee discussions of the conflicted nomination.
 
The GCA Selection Committee representatives do not serve as nominator or endorser for any nomination submitted for an award.
 
The GCA Awards Team or GCA Technical Advisory Group members cannot be directly involved in nominations prior to their submittal.
 
Members of the GCA Selection Committee must maintain confidentiality about the internal discussions of the committee. Information about committee deliberations should not be shared with anyone outside the committee, nor should the recipient be discussed until GCA has announced them publicly.
 
Members of the GCA Selection Committee do not provide feedback to unsuccessful candidates. If a member is asked for feedback, this policy should be cited.
 
At the award selection stage, members of the GCA Selection Committee will be asked to self-identify any relationships/affiliations that might be perceived as a source of potential bias, and inform the team of the conflicts of interest before any candidates have been discussed. Members of the GCA Awards Team, GCA Technical Advisory Group members and the Jury will be asked to identify any candidates with whom they have had personal or working relationships, any other case where judgment could be affected, or identify any candidates from their current institution or one where they worked previously.

Although there are no conditions attached to the cash prize per se, the intent of the awards in general, and of the cash prize in particular, is to allow for small initiatives to gain visibility and resources, to scale up and develop. GCA will follow the winners throughout their journey for one year and strive to sustain their efforts where possible.