 My name's Hannah Mead and I've been organising the programme here at CDA9, but I've also had the privilege of managing the ecosystem-based adaptation session today, together with Elizabeth Kaka from UNED. As speakers, we had Keith Alberson from UNED, two members of the Maasai community in Kenya, Salat and Olte Dututu and Stephen Oleg Kusotu, William Atu, Lily Illeva from Practical Action Latin America, Paul and Teza from UNDP Uganda and Rosemary Makasa bringing a global perspective from the United Nations Environmental Assembly. The key challenge is emerging from the EVA session related to the participation of local communities in the process. I think people in the room realised that donors had reporting requirements and needed to demonstrate the effectiveness of why they should invest in these approaches as opposed to others, but people in the room were very insistent that any indicators were selected, needed to be relevant for the community and it was very important to reconcile those donor needs, the needs of the community as well, when it came to measuring effectiveness. Communities themselves on the ground know what's working and what's not working and how to measure that. We need to speak with them. Another key challenge came out from Paul and Teza's speech where he described the challenges associated with mainstreaming EVA measurement work into government. He's had experience of this as part of the Mountain EVA program that he's been working on and he's been doing that in district level in a number of countries such as Peru. Two questions were particularly interesting. One was a short question. How do we measure the effectiveness of system activities? It's very difficult. A second question related to this issue of how to do measurement in a more holistic way and Christina Sviderska from IAD suggested the biocultural heritage approach that she's developed in the Andes could provide some solutions there because it considers all aspects of local, environmental, social, cultural and indigenous knowledge in measuring and evaluation systems. There was some disagreement about the issue of quantifying ecosystem based adaptation. Keith Alderson was very clear that cost benefit analysis and other efforts to really quantify the benefits of ecosystem based approaches were a waste of time largely because they weren't capturing all of the wider scale costs and benefits that are experienced by the narrow kind of economic and analytical approaches that are normally used. But Edward Perry from Birdlife challenged that and said that if we don't measure these benefits coming from ecosystem based adaptation approaches it's going to be very hard to justify investing in those approaches to adaptation as opposed to other approaches. At the end of the session I asked on my panelist to provide us with a key issue or a key statement that they wanted people to take away with them from the session. Rose Mimucasa from Nuneir reminded us that local is global and global is local which I thought was a key message coming out of the session. Our Maasai colleagues also had two wonderful quotes that I'd like to share with you now. Stephen said that if we don't look after the environment we are in effect ecological terrorists destroying our own future and Salaton said that in our community we believe we are one system, one stem with a lot of branches.