Locally Led Adaptation
People and communities on the frontlines of climate change are often the most active and innovative in developing adaptation solutions. Yet, too often, they lack access to the resources and agency needed to implement them effectively. Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) can unlock, support and leverage the enormous potential and creativity of communities to develop and implement solutions. Shifting power to local stakeholders, without expecting them to shoulder the burden of adaptation, can catalyze adaptation that is effective, equitable, and transparent.
GCA’s Global Hub on LLA, located in the South Asia Regional Office in Dhaka, aims to empower local governments and communities through the provision of additional resources and capacity; and to scale up LLA best practices by influencing adaptation and development investments.
Contact Information
For more information on this program, or to get involved, please contact:
Anju Sharma
Lead, Locally Led Adaptation
anju.sharma@gca.org
Call for Stories on Locally Led Adaptation
Principles for Locally Led Adaptation
The eight LLA Principles were developed by the Global Commission on Adaptation and launched at the 2021 Climate Adaptation Summit, to guide efforts to promote LLA.
- Devolving decision making to the lowest appropriate level: Giving local institutions and communities more direct access to finance and decision-making power over how adaptation actions are defined, prioritized, designed, implemented; how progress is monitored; and how success is evaluated.
- Addressing structural inequalities faced by women, youth, children, disabled, displaced, Indigenous Peoples and marginalised ethnic groups: Integrating gender-based, economic, and political inequalities that are root causes of vulnerability into the core of adaptation action and encouraging vulnerable and marginalized individuals to meaningfully participate in and lead adaptation decisions.
- Providing patient and predictable funding that can be accessed more easily: Supporting long-term development of local governance processes, capacity, and institutions through simpler access modalities and longer term and more predictable funding horizons, to ensure that communities can effectively implement adaptation actions.
- Investing in local capabilities to leave an institutional legacy: Improving the capabilities of local institutions to ensure they can understand climate risks and uncertainties, generate solutions, and facilitate and manage adaptation initiatives over the long term without being dependent on project based donor funding.
- Building a robust understanding of climate risk and uncertainty: Informing adaptation decisions through a combination of local, traditional, Indigenous, generational and scientific knowledge that can enable resilience under a range of future climate scenarios.
- Flexible programming and learning: Enabling adaptive management to address the inherent uncertainty in adaptation, especially through robust monitoring and learning systems, flexible finance, and flexible programming.
- Ensuring transparency and accountability: Making processes of financing, designing, and delivering programs more transparent and accountable downward to local stakeholders.
- Collaborative action and investment: Collaboration across sectors, initiatives and levels to ensure that different initiatives and different sources of funding (humanitarian assistance, development, disaster risk reduction, green recovery funds, etc.) support each other, and their activities avoid duplication, to enhance efficiencies and good practice.
Global Hub on Locally Led Adaptation
The online platform of the Global Hub on Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) aims to inform, connect and inspire local communities and practitioners around the world with the latest knowledge and solutions for LLA.
Locally Led Adaptation for Pro-poor Infrastructure
GCA’s Global Program on Locally Led Adaptation was developed to address the need for people-centric, climate-smart development that gives lower-income and vulnerable communities, including women, a voice in adaptation investment planning and implementation. A bottom-up approach to investing in public services, nature-based solutions, and infrastructure in urban areas – including affordable housing, resilient transport connectivity, and water and waste management – will help cities become more resilient. While other local organizations are often best suited to support these bottom-up approaches, these stakeholders often cannot access finance at a scale that is required. GCA’s Global Hub on LLA bridges this gap by facilitating the preparation of locally led ‘People’s Plans’ for adaptation and consolidating these plans into investment projects of International Finance Institutions.
The LLA Program is already supporting the delivery of urban climate adaptation solutions, which include a significant community engagement component, in Monrovia (Liberia) and Dakar (Senegal).
GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards
The GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards 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.
Training and Mentoring for Journalists and Digital Content Creators
These training and mentoring courses help journalists and digital content makers support adaptation action in the battle against the impacts of climate change.
Locally Led Planning: A Guide for Building Climate Resilience in Urban Informal Settlements
This Guide provides resources for locally-led, inclusive, multisectoral upgrading for climate resilience in urban informal settlements. Designed as a guide not a toolkit, it pays particular attention to context and its variation across cities and countries.
Stories of Resilience
In this year’s Stories of Resilience, we 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.
Partners
News
Blogs
Videos
Technical and Whitepapers
2024 Stories of Resilience: Lessons from Local Adaptation Practice
The key message from this year’s Stories of Resilience is the need for urgent and rapid reform in how global and national climate finance is delivered, in the power dynamics between providers and recipients, and in how success
2023 Stories of Resilience: Lessons from Local Adaptation Practice
In this year’s Stories of Resilience, we 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.
Locally Led Planning: A Guide for Building Climate Resilience in Urban Informal Settlements
This Guide provides resources for locally led, inclusive, multisectoral upgrading for climate resilience in urban informal settlements.
Events
Training of Trainers -Institutionalizing Locally Led Adaptation across sectors in Bangladesh
12 May 2025
Dhaka Bangladesh
Institutionalizing Locally Led Adaptation in South Asia
12 February 2025
Everest Hotel, Kathmandu,Nepal
Knowledge Workshop: Climate Change and Locally Led Adaptation in Bangladesh
9 December 2024
BPATC, Savar, Bangladesh
Enhancing Direct Access for Locally Led Adaptation
4 December 2024
Hotel Safari Park, Nairobi, Kenya
Book Launch Discussion – 2024 Stories of Resilience: Local Adaptation in Practice
14 November 2024
Climate Funds Pavilion, COP29, Baku Azerbaijan
GCA Meet the Winners Event: Presentation of the Winners of the 2024 GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards
13 November 2024
Independant University Hub, COP29, Baku, Azerbaijan
GCA COP29 Leaders Event – Global Champions for Locally Led Adaptation
13 November 2024
Resilience Hub, COP29, Baku,Azerbaijan
Stories of Resilience: Lessons from Local Adaptation Practice
6 March 2024
Gobeshona Global Conference 4
Meet the 2023 LLA Champions: Winners of the 2023 GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards
4 March 2024
Gobeshona Global Conference 4
People’s Planning for Climate Change Adaptation in Coastal Towns of Bangladesh
4 March 2024
Gobeshona Global Conference 4
Local Governments, Global Stocktake
10 December 2023
Bangladesh Pavilion, UNFCCC COP28, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Meet the Champions: Presentations by Winners of the GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards
6 December 2023
UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) Pavilion, UNFCCC COP28, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
2023 GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards Ceremony
5 December 2023
Resilience Hub, UNFCCC COP28, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Launch of 2023 Stories of Resilience: Local Adaptation in Practice
1 December 2023
Resilience Hub, UNFCCC COP28, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Community Dialogue: #DoubleAdaptationFinance: Make it Accessible, Flexible, Predictable
3 September 2023
Serena Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya
2023 Local Adaptation Champions Awards: Live Q&A Session
15 August 2023
Global
Meet the Champions: A Conversation with the winners of the 2022 GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards
16 March 2023
Global
Lessons from Mukuru: Building climate resilience in urban informal settlements
15 March 2023
Global
Bridging the Data Gap for Locally Led Adaptation: A Roundtable for Practitioners
14 March 2023
Global
Adaptation and Resilience Measures: From Commitment to Implementation
6 March 2023
Noum Hotel Abidjan, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
GCA South Asia Partnerships Forum 2022
11 December 2022
Dhaka, Bangladesh (Hybrid)
Launch of the Global Hub on Locally Led Adaptation
11 December 2022
Bangladesh Foreign Service Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Scaling up LLA: A Conversation with Practitioners
14 November 2022
LLA Pavilion
Meet the Local Adaptation Champions
14 November 2022
GCA Pavilion
Stories of Resilience: Lessons from Local Adaptation Practice
14 November 2022
LLA Pavilion
GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards Ceremony
12 November 2022
Resilience Hub at COP27, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt
Information Session: GCA Local Adaptation Champions Awards
21 June 2022
Global
1st annual Gobeshona Global Conference
18 January 2021
Global
Contact Information
For more information on this program, or to get involved, please contact:
Anju Sharma
Lead, Locally Led Adaptation
anju.sharma@gca.org