 Thank you very much Salim Good to see you all here. I'm as a Salim promised I'm going to try and throw out some challenges for those who are watching online Please don't quote these things as if this is what I believe I'm going to say some things which are intended to be provocations and questions One of the participants Pablo said last night at dinner that he felt that there is not enough Controversy in the meeting that we're playing it too safe that we are not looking at things In a way, which is challenging to our own thinking we're becoming complacent So what I want to do is to throw out some things that are controversial to try and make us think a bit more And I also think we're not thinking big enough I'm going to give some suggestions why it's a problem that we're not thinking big enough and and with great urgency I also think that we're not Accepting enough that climate change is not a new thing Which is separate from everything that has been going on before I don't think there are enough link linkages between what we're doing for climate adaptation and the previous knowledge and experience we have in Development work and in development studies Now the first challenge is to say that nobody is defining community I've been to four of these conferences There is very little reflection at all on what we mean by community We say oh, we're going to work with the most vulnerable Communities or the most vulnerable people and we don't really reflect on what that means And I think we really do and people are not reflecting on what we mean by community based So I think we need to really be opening that up for discussion Much more fundamentally we therefore need to think about why are we working at the community level? What is the reason for which we think the community so-called community is where we should be working and We need to justify that much more With the idea of working at community level goes back 40 years in Development work not in community in climate adaptation But 40 years of work in which there has been a challenge to top-down policies relating to development and the idea that top-down Related to trickle-down theory is not working for poor people in developing countries And from this emerged the challenge of doing work in a participatory way Which is what community based adaptation almost always implies that it is intended to be participatory Now I'm going to suggest that we don't have enough top-down policies So the scaling up issue that is the theme of this work here I'm going to challenge that and suggest that actually we should be doing much more in relation to top-down policies Because the problem is now that community is worshipped We there is no problem now which NGOs or some donors will discuss Which cannot be solved by putting community based in front of it So we have community based natural resource management community based health and first aid we have community based This this that's in the other so so long as we put community based in front of the problem We plan to address we think we're doing it right because it gives the justification that we claim its participatory So I kind of joke about this and say that actually we've invented saint community which can perform miracles And I want to challenge this idea that we cannot assume that what we mean by community is Valid in achieving what we claim we want to achieve for adaptation I'm sorry for the PowerPoint in the sense that I know everyone gets fed up with PowerPoints But in a bad acoustic where people are in different languages and we have video Watching us. It's a way of Enabling people to see what I'm saying. I hope a bit more on easily So the first question is do we actually understand what we mean by community? and What do we mean when we say community based? So I think we have to really go back to basics on this and think about what might possibly be wrong with community based adaptation or Inadequate about it and do we need to be thinking beyond it? So these are my kind of initial controversies is community a sufficient as a basis for achieving adaptation And I'm going to suggest that it is not and what do we need to be doing as well as and sometimes instead of Community based adaptation So what do we need to do instead of or as well as and are we thinking big enough? Where does community based adaptation fit into the much wider scheme of? International politics national politics and so on So starting then with the problem of community. What is a community? I asked some of the participants in a short course. We were doing here to write down their definition of community At understandably out of the 40 people there were 40 different definitions There was quite a lot of overlap Amongst them many of them said it's about culture. It's about identity. Many of them said it's about place and location Out of these different definitions. I would think that most people in this room would assume that community means a location And that location is where you perform your adaptation at the community level. We need to think about that What does it involve? Does everyone belong to a community? Is it a place? Is it a location? And let's unpack that and think about it and in what way is community based different from just thinking about individuals or households How would we pin that down to save right? We are doing this at the community level and that is different qualitatively different from dealing with individuals or households for example can a community make collective decisions Usually not they are internally divided. We have to understand these internal divisions Why are communities relevant for doing community-based adaptation? We have to justify why they are relevant and they also involve power relations power relations Including land tenure and we shouldn't be afraid to talk about things like power and land tenure Access to and control over resources. We have to restore a willingness to talk about class economic and social class and the power that is connected with it. I have not found any research or NGO action going on in South Asia that looks at land tenure as a Significant factor which may make it difficult for people to adapt and Yet we're sitting in a region including Bangladesh Where estimates vary between 40 and possibly as much as 60% of the population have no ownership of tiny ownership of land How do we expect landless people to adapt? I don't have a clear answer to that But we should at least be thinking about it in every village that you go to in Bangladesh or India and Nepal Pakistan a significant proportion of the people are landless Nobody is researching what it means for them to adapt We have to be looking at issues like land tenure and the power relations that go with them And we need to be thinking about not just poverty reduction, but wealth reduction and sharing We need to be thinking and I'll come back to this at the end of my slides And I would hazard a phrase and say there is no such thing as community We've invented it as a convenience for our work How do we define it? Difficult it has internal divisions Agnes has just been speaking about gender issues in every single place that we call a community It is divided on gender lines those gender divisions Relate to how much work is done whether people of different genders get more or less food And we think it's a community now We all claim that we want to mainstream gender issues into it But I think that is actually quite difficult and tough because culturally many communities with these gender differences Do not have the same idea about how gender should be gender relations should be changed as we might have and that's a challenge There are internal divisions, which we are not acknowledging enough including the land tenure one They're divided on gender class ethnicity caste religion age group Are we doing enough to actually acknowledge that or are we pretending that they can all work together and make collective decisions? My early Research work, which was in India many years ago. I visited a friend's village. He was from Tamil Nadu We went to the village. He showed me around. I had a very interesting time a swim in the ocean And as we were about to leave to go back to the town where he lived He said, oh The head man as the village has seen us. I will have to introduce you to him and So I go over and meet this man and he shows me his house offers me tea and so on the usual hospitality and as we're leaving I'm shaking hands with the head of the village Who does speaks no English and my friend speaks very very good English and he's Translating but also giving me a commentary in my ear as I shake hands He says by the way, do you want to know why he's the head of the village? He owns more land than anybody else Last year his wage laborers the workers in his fields protested about the low wages He was paying and he had the two leaders killed So I shake hands smile more and get out of there as quickly as possible because I'm shaking hands with a murderer If we went from outside as an NGO, we would call that a community How do we deal with that? So we've got these power relationships, which are vitally important to understand in these divisions communities are not warm and cuddly They respond to us in a way, which is different because when we go there there's resources available There is possibilities of doing things when we use the concept of community. It is we who find it convenient We use it because it fits our idea of fairness and working at the grassroots the grass The participatory approach that's emerged over the last 40 years Community fits with what we want to do and what funders think is good for delivering to the poorest or the most vulnerable We need to think about the distortions and problems that emerge out of our comfort with using the idea of community In other words community equals where we are working and I think that is the most significant definition that we could use Doing CBA community based adaptation is also immoral and therefore wrong Now that's a powerful statement. Of course. I don't exactly believe it in this in this bold way Why am I saying this the reason is by definition community based adaptation? implemented through NGOs using donor money whatever can by definition only reach a Percentage of the people and in most countries it would be a minority of the people We cannot do adaptation For climate change unless it is for everybody So I'm throwing out the challenge how as people who morally are interested in adaptation Do we create systems alongside CBA which enable adaptation to happen for everybody? because if we are comfortable working in the community based area we are Immoral in the sense that we are not thinking about how it works for everyone Every single person and household needs to adapt So what do we do about what what happens to the rest? Our solution for this is normally what is called advocacy But the question is does it work because for adverse advocacy to work and for our community based activities to be scaled up Somebody has to care the government has to care for example that actually the evidence we provide is useful and worthwhile So what are we left with in actually thinking about what is community based adaptation and what is its role? I would say that it enables experiments and the emergence of new adaptation measures That is perfectly valid and very good to be doing and we need to provide the basis for that and the evidence that comes from it It gives us evidence an evidence base for how adaptation can and should be done although And and where and how adaptation funding should be used for example It enables us to link potentially with government local government in especially as agency as we heard from a Bangladeshi colleague here just now But we also need to be wary as does evidence actually work if we do evidence-based Advocacy we have to realize that many people who receive evidence For creating evidence-based policy are not interested in evidence They're interested in ideology They will go against the evidence if the evidence disproves what they believe without without on the basis of their ideology We cannot assume that evidence will produce the result. We think is justified We also think that CBA can develop adaptation measures that are self Self-starting if an NGO is only doing adaptation measures in a community Which require the NGO to be there to give money or to do things with funds? Then we're not going to achieve it every single village where there is not an NGO has to have the opportunity For adaptation measures which can be done without an NGO and without any money They have to be self-starting and profitable on their own basis So what I'm saying is that we need to be using CBA to support the design of top-down policies that Enable adaptation for every single person at every single household and we have to be thinking about CBA in that context So what else should happen to enable adaptation for everybody? How do we make sure that CBA activities some or all of them are profitable and can spread quickly to other places? I think in the our cab project that is operating getting going in Bangladesh Some of these issues have been designed into it So that may be a supportive model which we've talked about to some extent in this conference Which other people might want to look at it is about how you scale them up quickly and spread them quickly Here is one key thing that I think we need to think about and that is livelihood diversification especially for rural activities which reduce climate dependency in most poor developing countries and Very very high proportion of the population is almost hundred percent climate dependent Whatever we do to adapt agriculture leaves them still climate dependent We may be able to tweak some things with saline tolerant rice heat tolerant wheat blah blah blah We may be able to do something about that But I think we have to shift a significant proportion of people out of being climate dependent by developing alternative Livelihoods, and I think that's also good for poverty reduction and development generally and to do this We need top-down policies that will help adaptation for everyone For example, we should explore the extension of social protection measures into what is called adaptive social protection For example, that could include training measures for additional livelihoods education for diversification cash transfers vouchers for training for health for education and I think we need to be understanding we need to think much bigger We need to be understanding and discussing and linking climate change adaptation at the community level with the much bigger sphere of Changes that need to take place in the world. We need to support massive reduction in the number of people who are climate dependent We need to shift funds for non-agricultural livelihoods, but rural based Which mean we also need to be thinking about supporting strategic retreat through supported migration from areas which cannot be Cannot be maintained over time We need to think about investment in a very old geography concept growth poles or small-town growth centers Which support the movement away from dependence on climate and agriculture into non agricultural rural livelihoods in small based on small-town growth and we need to understand and learn What has happened over the last 50 years especially in Taiwan South Korea parts of India and China where we have had this Transition to rural industrialization and rural livelihoods, which are not farm based We need to bring that knowledge into it and understand it for how you get people out of being climate dependent Now I'm not proposing that those models are beautiful models They are in fact they have been in many cases environmentally disastrous But we have the knowledge to deal with the environmental risks What I'm saying is we need to think big about very rapid transitions that South Korea Taiwan Underwent a transition from a situation in which a vast majority of their people were farming and agriculture and therefore climate dependent To where there is a minority who are dependent on climate and agriculture Those transitions took 30 years China's transition has taken less time in many ways We need to be thinking big about how do we achieve this urgent transition to a less climate dependent world In order to deal with the emergency of climate change and change the way the world works To two last slide Selim. I'm sorry. I know you're worried about my time keeping Rob van der Berg of the Jeff gave a talk a few weeks ago at IDS in Sussex And he said he gave these startling figures. He said the current funding available For adaptation projects is of the annual figure of around 10 billion The lowest or the the median estimate of what is needed for adaptation Stern oxfam and so on is that we need a hundred billion per year to enable adaptation to take place He then throws into this mix what's going in the contrary direct direction He has picked out an estimate that public subsidies excluding the private sector is giving away to fossil fuel industries And resource intensive fossil fuel intensive agriculture A thousand billion a year And that is doing the exact opposite of producing a reduction of greenhouse emissions In other words public money from governments around the world gives 10 million 10 billion to adapt and then gives a Thousand million to damage the world even more Now if somebody in the Jeff is worried to the extent that he gives those kind of figures We should be worried that we are not talking seriously enough about the other issues Which are creating the problem and us piddling around with a few billion dollars to try and fix the problem We've got to think about that some other shocking figures the top 200 energy companies last year alone Spent that figure 674 billion dollars Exploring for new oil gas and coal We've got 10 billion to do adaptation That is shocking The estimate for wealth kept in secret tax havens amounts by one estimate 21 trillion Dollars these tax havens like the British Virgin Islands the clue is in the name when the British government comes to Bangladesh or any of your Countries and says we need to deal with the corruption in your country You tell them to get lost and go and fix the corruption in Britain Okay, because Britain has an institutionalized set of corruption which manages these tax havens in different parts of the world The cost of the war in Afghanistan Iraq and the so-called war on terror annual spending in 2006. This is an estimate from the US Congress budget committee 80,000 billion dollars in in that one year What are we doing? We are really tiny tiny insects trying to push an elephant Let's get real about this and at least acknowledge that we're facing these problems and here we are trying to do community-based adaptation Thank you very much Thank you very much Terry