6th Conference on community-based adaptation to climate change
More than 300 climate change specialists from 60 countries gathered in Hanoi, Vietnam for the 6th Conference on Community Based Adaptation (CBA) to Climate Change in April 2012.
Conference delegates visited an irrigation project in Thanh Hoa province (Photo: Mike Shanahan/IIED)
The conference theme was "Communicating about community-based adaptation", and the programme included sessions on key skills such as blogging, working with the media, and using participatory games to communicate about risk.
The conference's opening sessions included a video address from Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCC, as well as opening remarks from Margareta Wahlstrom, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction.
In keeping with the communications theme, the organisers broadcast live interviews online each day, delegates wrote nearly 30 blog posts and produced nearly 2,000 tweets.
A session entitled "From the front lines to the newspaper's front page" saw practitioners learning how to develop climate change stories to pitch to a news editor.
Pablo Suarez of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre facilitated an interactive session on participatory games. Other sessions looked at photo storytelling, participatory video and 3D modelling.
Before the formal conference opened, delegates visited projects across Vietnam to see how communities living in different ecosystems have adapted to climate change. The delegates awarded a special “Solidarity Grant” of US$5,000 to a Save the Children project working with ethnic minorities in northern Vietnam which focused on child-centred disaster risk reduction.
Conference materials
IIED blog posts from the conference:
- A tale of typhoons, trees and tiny creatures that stood between a community and climate resilience
- Mangroves break waves and help the people of Dai Hop Commune break even
- Vietnam: Building one village’s resilience to climate change all starts with a cave
- Top tips for pitching climate change adaptation stories to the media
- Where honey means money and climate means change
- Knowledge is power in this game of chance (called life)
You can read about the conference in this news story for selected media coverage of the conference and watch a playlist of interviews by the ACCRA Consortium.
- Find out more about the series of conferences in the community-based adaptation (CBA) conference archive
