Adapting to climate change will entail adjustments and changes at community, regional and national levels. To enable workable and effective adaptation measures, local and national government planners and policy makers, as well as stakeholders including non-government organizations, must consider integrating climate change into their planning, budgeting and decision making.
Integrating climate change into planning requires two types of information. First, information relating to climate change vulnerability is needed. This means knowledge relating to the factors that make people vulnerable to existing and potential climatic stresses, such as access to resources and services, political access and secure livelihoods. Such information is likely to be gleaned from vulnerable communities themselves. The second type of information required relates to existing and potential climatic stresses. This includes predicted climatic trends, existing climatic hazards that are likely to be exacerbated, and which regions and sectors will suffer the impacts first and worst. Such information is available from experts and national level studies.
Both bottom-up information on vulnerability and top-down information on impacts is important for integrating climate change into planning at all levels. Much of the international discussion and debate to date, however, is based on an impacts-based approach to adaptation planning at the national level, through National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAS). At the other end of the scale, some attention has been paid to community-based strategies that take a ‘vulnerability first’ approach to adaptation. These, however, have not been successfully scaled up to inform planning and policymaking across scales. This article proposes a way to integrate top-down and bottom-up approaches when mainstreaming adaptation into planning (from the local through to the national level) currently being piloted in Nepal: Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPAS).
