Recognizing that small communities are often the most severely affected, yet the least equipped to deal with the impacts of climate change impacts, the GEF council proposed that 10% of the resources under the Strategic Priority on Adaptation be channeled to community-based activities through the mechanism of the GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP) (document GEF/C.23/Inf.8/Rev.1, May 11, 2004).

In response, UNDP, in collaboration with SGP, has designed the CBA project to achieve the goal of reducing vulnerability and increasing adaptive capacity to the adverse effects of climate change in the focal areas in which the GEF works, building the resilience of communities, ecosystems, and resource-dependant livelihoods in the face of climate change.  The CBA project will accomplish this through the following objective and set of outcomes: 

The CBA represents the community-based component of the GEF Strategic Priority on Adaptation (SPA). The SPA is an ecosystem-based climate change adaptation fund, designed to support ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change, including variability. The CBA is a global project, implmented as a key component of UNDP-GEF's wider adaptation portfolio.

In addition, the CBA uses an innovative system for monitoring and evaluation, termed the Vulnerability Reduction Assessment (VRA). The VRA uses a system of question-based indicators to assess changes in community-level perception of their own capacity to adapt to changing climate, and forms an index. This focuses evaluation on the priorities of local stakeholders, and allows for monitoring and aggregating over a highly diverse range of countries, communities, and ecosystems while retaining locally specific information.

Further project information can be found here

Country Drivenness

Country-drivenness is a key principle behind the CBA programme, and community-driven interventions are leveraged to contribute to national climate change adaptation priorities.  This is ensured through CBA National Coordinating Committees in each country, which consider CBA project proposals for approval based on criteria including technical feasibility, project quality, and consistency with national adaptation priorities. 

National Coordinating Committees are composed of various groups of national stakeholders, commonly including government representatives, UN system representatives, civil society, private sector, indigenous representatives, and other key stakeholders.  Consistency with national adaptation priorities is ensured in many countries through the inclusion of UNFCCC focal points: