Solidarity in disaster

Locally-led climate action

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) Small Grants Programme (SGP), implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has over three decades of experience in providing financial and technical support to civil society and community-based organizations at the local level to tackle global environmental issues, such as climate change, while improving livelihoods.

One of the best way to address loss and damage linked to climate change is to make funding available directly to local communities, Indigenous peoples, and civil society organizations, so that they can design, implement, and deliver their own innovative solutions that are culturally appropriate and context specific.

Investing in local communities is also key to unlocking further investments and allowing successful initiatives to be shared, scaled up and replicated elsewhere.

The following projects are examples of how an effective community focused channel can provide valuable lessons to inform the design of such a mechanism within the loss and damage fund.

Building resilient communities in Dominica

In Dominica, SGP supported training on disaster preparedness for community emergency response teams in 2015, which proved to be prescient when tropical storm Erika hit later that year.

In 2017, the country was struck by its first ever Category 5 hurricane, Maria, which damaged or destroyed a staggering 95% of its houses and caused $1.3 billion in losses, or 226% of its annual gross domestic product.

This disaster mitigation project also included the construction of a 3,000-foot-long storm drain in Bagatelle, a village on the southern coast prone to landslides.

After Maria, SGP provided communities with materials for reconstruction and helped with fundraising to enable the purchase of equipment.

The experience of directly managing SGP grants also helped communities access over $500,000 provided by the government through the Green Climate Fund for reconstruction and resilience building, which allowed them to scale up their projects and catalyse recovery efforts, including renovating and upgrading community shelters.

Despite these efforts to improve Dominica’s resilience to climate change, its vulnerability to extreme climate events still threatens livelihoods.

One example of this is within the apiculture sector - developed by the Indigenous Kalinago community.

In response, local civil society is now advocating for the establishment of a community recovery facility to support recovery and rebuilding after storms and natural disasters.

Improving water access in Armenia

Armenia is a nation already challenged with water insecurity, a situation expected to be exacerbated by climate change; models indicate its water availability will decline by up to 39% by 2100.

The country’s agricultural sector relies heavily on irrigation, but meeting this demand is becoming increasingly difficult.

In the Lori region, agriculture and livestock production are the main occupations and sources of income for the population of the Lernavan and Shenavan settlements.

However, with scarce water resources and no irrigation infrastructure, these communities have lost at least $300,000 in agricultural produce every year over the past three decades.

To address the effects of climate change and improve agricultural productivity, SGP supported them through the construction of low-cost water reservoirs.

With a total capacity of 16,000 m³ and fully equipped for collecting water from dispersed sources that were previously unused - such as mountain seeps and springs - these reservoirs fit into the natural landscape and use innovative and low-cost technologies and approaches.

An irrigation system was also built in each settlement to help rehabilitate degraded land, improving the livelihoods of 400 households.

Community members are responsible for directly managing these new systems, having access to their own water resources, paying an affordable price for irrigated water, and deciding how to invest the savings generated. Participants have also been able to attract additional resources from the government, thanks to the important skills and experience gained through this SGP project.

Improving food security in Viet Nam

At the delta of the Kon River in Viet Nam’s Binh Dinh province, saltwater intrusion and waterlogging driven by sea level rise is damaging rice fields in low-lying areas.

SGP has been supporting the Binh Dinh’s Union of Sciences and Technologies Associations since 2009 to address these damages, protect livelihoods, and improve food security by promoting sustainable community-based agriculture.

The project has developed and implemented several adaptive solutions, including the selection of rice varieties better adapted to climate change, use of cultivation techniques to increase these varieties’ adaptability and ability to recover from damages, and changes to planting and harvesting times to reduce flooding and saltwater intrusion impacts on the sensitive stages of rice growth.

The project also set up a disaster recovery support fund managed by a local women’s union to help female farmers recover from flooding.

SGP has also been addressing droughts and water shortages in the dry season that are worsened by climate change.

These droughts have been forcing local farmers in Phu Cat and Tay Son districts, also in Binh Dinh province, to shift from water-intensive crops to others, such as cassava and peanuts, which often leads to soil degradation due to the use of extensive monoculture practices.

In 2008, a SGP project successfully tested the introduction of intensive and intercropping cultivation methods that use both cassava and peanuts.

These methods do not require irrigation in the dry season and significantly reduce pests, leading to a decrease in the use of pesticides and diseases. This successful pilot spurred the provincial government to issue a policy to support sustainable cassava development, but farmers have not yet been able to fully benefit due to a lack of funding and training.

To address this, SGP supported the Binh Dinh Gardening Extension Association to implement a further project that introduced culturally appropriate and climate-smart agriculture techniques, provided technical training, promoted knowledge exchange, and established a revolving fund to provide financial support to local farmers and boost their production.

By 2017, the successful peanut-cassava intercropping model had reached 2,200 hectares in Phu Cat district, improving soil quality and increasing productivity by nearly 12%.