 Welcome to everyone who's joining the CBA 15 opening plenary and good morning or good afternoon or good evening, wherever it is that you are. I'm going to take over and share my screen now. I'm going to hand over to Claire Sacchia, who is going to moderate today's discussion. So over to you, Claire. Thank you very much, Sam. It's a very exciting time. We're in CBA 15. It's some some way into this longest super year ever. So 2020 was meant to be the super year where we had a number of big multilateral events due to the pandemic. We've actually had two years of the super year with a lot of the work from 2020 pushed into 2021. But we did have CBA 14 during 2020. So this isn't the second CBA of this super year. But we're now six months off the climate change talks, COP 26 in Glasgow and and presumably not far off CBD. The biodiversity summit. We've got the food summit coming as well. So this is this is an important moment for this community to come together, share our learning, discuss what's working and and think about what messages we have for the rest of the world, as well as what we might take home to our own countries on delivery. So to kick us off in this exciting week of activities, I'd like to introduce the chair of the LDC group, His Excellency Sonam Wangdi, to provide the first remarks. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen. It is my pleasure to extend a warm welcome to you all, wherever you are connecting around the world. And thank you for joining us online to mark the beginning of the 15th International Conference on Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change. This is the second time the CBA community has come together online. We are all adjusting to the challenging new realities brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. And we welcome the commitment to ensuring that this community of practice can continue to meet, interact and inspire each other. This year remains a critical year for action on climate, biodiversity loss and poverty. While our attention has been on the pandemic, these crises have not left us. The stakes have never been higher today than before. A recent World Economic Forum report found that half of the world's GDP, $44 trillion, is moderately or highly dependent on nature, which is globally under threat in many places. Indeed, all of these challenges are interlinked and the vulnerable and marginalized people suffer the most and are the hardest hit. This year, our collective desire to bounce back stronger from the pandemic presents a tremendous opportunity. The COP 15 on Biological Diversity and COP 26 on Climate Change will be held towards the end of this year. We must use these moments to recommit ourselves and call the major economic leaders to provide leadership to deliver ambitious indices, to close the ambition gap, to keep the 1.5 degree Celsius goal within reach and to scale up support for real actions on the ground, in particular for locally led adaptation actions. The Leeds Develop Countries Group have launched the LDC vision to be on climate resilient development pathways by 2030 and deliver net zero emissions by 2050 to ensure our societies and ecosystems thrive at the UN Secretary General Summit in 2019. Through the Life Air Initiative, we are working on the whole of society approach through government collaboration and a mechanism that will deliver 70% of the climate finance to the local level. At CBA 14, we began discussions on a set of principles on how adaptation can meet the needs of the most vulnerable. This year, eight principles are now currently gathering endorsements from organisations all over the world from both the public and private sector. At this CBA, we will explore what those mean in practice. We will seek your perspectives on what needs to change to ensure all people can thrive in prosperous, resilient societies. The CBA 15 is an opportunity for practitioners to be heard on these important issues. It is you, the practitioners and representatives of your communities who are on the front line of climate change impacts. It is you who have the knowledge and experience we need to inform future progress. The CBA 15 has five themes and discussions on these themes are more relevant today than ever before. First, the climate finance theme will explore how climate finance can be made more accessible to those on the front line of climate action. Second, the responsive policy theme will look at how communities are pushing for more inclusive decision making. Third, the nature-based solution theme will focus on food systems exploring how we can capitalise on indigenous and local knowledge. Fourth, the new innovation for adaptation theme will identify what works in bringing innovative ideas into mainstream. Finally, the huge inclusion theme will explore how young people can have more involvement in decision making. Alongside the workshops, I also encourage you to participate in the community boards, join the skills shares to build your knowledge and to fully participate in the conference. The CBA 15 is your platform as community-based adaptation practitioners. It is a space where your voice can be amplified and where we can push for climate action needed to protect our communities. We look forward to a very interactive discussion and innovative solution to improve the abilities of our local communities to adapt to the effects of climate change, build resilience to climate shocks and reduce vulnerability. I thank you and wish you all success. Great. Thank you so much, Dr Angdy. Today we are still going through, all the negotiators are still hard at work in this rather strange virtual SBs, the intermediate climate discussions. So we don't have many of them with us this time, but we do have three excellent panellists representative of this incredible group of practitioners and community representatives and international partners, development partners. So we have Dr Mohammed Moosa, who is the Executive Director of WRAP International, who has been one of the Global Commission for Adaptation Commissioners alongside Sheila Patel, who between them ushered in the oversaw and ride leadership for the locally led action track, where we saw the principles for locally led adaptation being kicked off at the Climate Adaptation Summit, and with over 50 organisations and countries, governments signed up to them now, and the other day the G7 welcomed them. So we're very glad to have Dr Moosa with us today. We also have Grace Baluwag, who is a Panpei-igoropt indigenous woman from the Philippines. I hope I pronounced that right, Grace, please do correct me. The Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Coordinator for the TEBTEBA, which is a network of indigenous peoples and provides a lot of input and influence at the climate negotiations. And finally, but by fatherly, Susan Landudu, who's the Executive Director of ACTAID, a partner from Uganda, a long-term partner of CBA, and will be bringing the messages from CBA 14 and connecting us to the previous CBA. So welcome you all. I wonder, Dr Moosa, if you'd like to make some first remarks. Thank you very much. Welcome everybody, and it's an honour and pleasure for me to be able to speak at this point in time as we begin CBA 15. I feel humbled that I can make some remarks, especially on the locally-led adaptation and its role in advancing adaptation programme. Now, we all know that local communities who actually encounter the problem of climate change most, they play a largest role in advancing the climate change adaptation programme through their local leadership. However, we also know that their leadership often are under-recognised, maybe sometime even under-appreciated and definitely under-resourced. And when that happens, it's the women, girls, youth from the local communities, including those who live with disability, those who are living in marginalised situation and face the pain of climate change most, their initiatives then get sideline. The good news is, over the last few years to decade, there's more and more recognition. That the leadership of local communities need to be not only recognised but also supported. We began to see commitment are coming up and more and more organisations including government, bilateral, multilateral organisations and making commitment in favour of supporting locally-led adaptation. However, those commitments need to be translated from rhetoric to action. And that's where these eight principles of locally-led adaptation came in. These eight principles of locally-led adaptation that I'm going to talk a little bit about is an outcome of years of concentration that was led by a group of professionals from different organisations. And that concentration took place with more than 50 organisations. And many of those humble leaders are here, many of those respected leaders are here, who reached out to communities, who reached out to various groups and collected and obtained your views and put together the eight principles. I feel humbled myself to be able to talk about that. Those eight principles, as I'm not going to go into details, should not be seen as eight isolated principles. They are kind of come together and they are supposed to really lead not only support to the local adaptation groups but also they're supposed to help in transforming the way we do business in promoting adaptation, especially as adaptation stakeholders. We advance this work in adaptation, build resilience. And it's talking about transformation in the way we promote adaptation on the ground. It talks about shifting the power and responsibility to as much as possible to the local communities, to the hand of those who really promote adaptation, who advance adaptation. Among the eight principles, now some of them are very critical, starting with that making sure that the decision-making power of the adaptation goes to the local communities. And not only goes to the local communities, it also ensures that it addresses the structural inequalities that is there even at the local level as well as in other levels of the global system. It makes sure that the support that comes to the local adaptation is kind of more predictable, whatever it comes. It's not short-term projects. It also makes sure that we invest in building local capacities. One of the principles promotes the concept that what is needed is bringing in local knowledge, capture those local historical and cultural tacit knowledge and blend those well with the scientific knowledge to create higher values. And as we do programmes, we must make sure that we remain flexible. All this also boils down to the fact that as we support and promote local-led adaptation, we must remain accountable for that with transparency, and that requires a lot of collaboration. If I may highlight a few things out of these local-led adaptation eight principles, the main points it will be coming that it puts local community and local initiatives at the front and centre. And that's what the journey is. It also emphasises that short-term project-based approach is not really going to help local communities to advance the adaptation activities because they are there, lives are there. It requires longer-term commitment. It requires more predictable commitment and support. It also basically says that let's make sure that local knowledge is there. Local knowledge is there. But at the end, the local-led adaptation principles really is calling for a learning journey, learning journey of going together with at least 14 years together, so that we learn, adjust, readjust our work and move further forward. It definitely calls for our activities to not to cause harm. I am not elaborate any more. It's an honour and pleasure to be able to talk about these eight principles of local-led adaptation. These are some of the things we'll be talking further together, but as I said at the beginning, those eight principles should not be seen as isolated principles. They should be looked at in an intertwined set of principles that should transform the way we really promote adaptation from business as usual to business unusual, where the power of decision-making, the responsibility of doing things is at the local level. Last question is, does that mean that it takes other actions from other levels of the who? No. Actions at other levels must happen. They must supplement the work of the local level and in order for local level to really play the right leadership role, other levels have responsibilities to play and those responsibilities include supporting local level actions, providing resources, ensuring that finance funds flows there, capacities are there and support through monitoring, learning journey and join hand. Thank you very much. I'm here to learn again in the coming days from all of you in this process. Very excited by being in the CBA 15. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Dr Moussa. It's really good to to have that overview of the principles and what that means for CBA. As Dr Moussa has said, this CBA is very much a family part of the learning journey for all of those who have endorsed the local-led adaptation principles. I do hope we can take this opportunity to really do hold each other, to account, learn from each other and really understand what it is going to be that's going to make the biggest difference. So now if I could invite Grace Ballowag perhaps to make your first remarks to the CBA 15 community. Good evening everyone from the Philippines. Greetings to all the participants for the CBA 15 and thanks for this opportunity to be able to share on the importance of linking nature and climate change crisis and its relevance to climate change adaptation. Nature and climate are definitely interlinked. This is emphasized by indigenous peoples based on our diverse traditional knowledge systems which we have been practicing over generations as people of the land and being dependent on nature for food, medicines, socioeconomic livelihoods, our cultural and spiritual life. We have been practicing and indigenous peoples are one of the practitioners and contributors to community-based adaptation actions using nature-based solutions. These contributions were being practiced long before this term NBS was adopted and promoted by various climate change and environmental bodies, conservation institutions and even funding mechanisms. The Paris Agreement notes the importance of indigenous traditional knowledge and that this knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge should be acknowledged with a view of integrating adaptation into relevant socioeconomic and environmental policies and actions. It is imperative that traditional knowledge is integrated into the local governance protocols that contribute to strengthen community resilience and multiple ecosystems as we adapt to these global crises and challenges. This integrated approach to climate change adaptation initiatives should link the societal and environmental crises and the current pandemic to the proven community and nature-based solutions and practices. These include the contributions of indigenous peoples, women and local communities as stewards of nature for generations. In turn, they should be supported by enabling policies, programs, governance and funding mechanisms. However, all these should take into account the right to free prior and informed consent of the holders and practitioners of the such knowledge systems and innovations. To sustain these local adaptation actions, the indigenous peoples and local communities in partnership with other stakeholders will also need long-term finance and logistical support of government, development partners and fund donors. This will further enable them to strengthen and sustain strong local-based organisations to mobilize and scale up community-based climate adaptation actions and solutions. Further, the Paris Agreement recognized the need to strengthen knowledge, technologies and practices of local communities and indigenous peoples related to addressing and responding to climate change and establishes a platform for the exchange of experiences and sharing of best practices on mitigation and adaptation in a holistic and integrated manner. With this, there should also be clear support for local to national knowledge sharing platforms towards strengthening and protecting the best practices of traditional knowledge, the knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems to addressing climate change impacts. Lastly, we reiterate the respect and promotion of rights and interests of indigenous peoples, women, youth and local communities related to the design and implementation of any climate adaptation measures, including community and nature-based actions, programs and policies on the management of lands, territories and resources. All these initiatives should further contribute to a more ambitious climate adaptation action that can quickly contribute to the achievement of the sustainable development goals, especially at the local and national levels. On a concluding note, may we ask the community of practice participants on what CPA will be able to offer during our discussions over the week in relation to this agenda on the significance of linking indigenous knowledge on community and nature-based solutions as part of adaptation actions. What would you like to see and contribute in response to this climate crisis in the CBA15 community and beyond? Thanks and hope to have more interactions later. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Grace and very important points about the bringing together what the communities want to do on what the communities would like to see on climate and nature solutions. I think it is a really important year for us to begin to build that holistic agenda as you're saying. So maybe first we'll finally go to Susan and Dudu and then maybe there'll be time for some quick follow-up questions possibly. Susan. Thank you Claire. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I can't be considered the veteran at these conferences. Gay 4 held in Tanzania and during one of those conferences perhaps it was CBA 10, Simon Anderson, a staff member of IAED ambushed me with a question of why I always come back. I don't know what I mambod on that day but I have chewed on that question for many years. Sometimes I tried not to come but I failed. Sometimes I think through it and I understand right now that it is the curiosity that brings me. My love for learning from this great space that attracts experiences from around the world. They validate what I know. This is a very important space that has shaped what I know about climate change and ultimately what and how I influence conversations back home. Now over the years we evolved as a community of practice from simply sharing our understanding of concepts such as adaptation, what is resilience and how to conduct vulnerability assessments to holding discussions on what works. We challenge ourselves to tell the stories of what does not work and being bold to take the messages to decision making tables around the world. We have established that inclusion, human centered approaches and genuine local participation is key to adaptation success and we began to consider how nature based solutions and young people can play their part. You have heard from grace that we also have to bring the indigenous communities back to the center of this conversation. We now understand the responsibility we have as a community in subjecting our experiences to rigorous questions and other views and using the synthesis to influence policy and practice. We are learning to take any chance we get for advocacy and I want to encourage all of you who be part of the CBA 15 to and those who have spaces at the decision making table to use the messages of CBA 15 to influence those spaces because none of the decision making spaces is too small. So today I'd like to bring just one message from CBA 14 that needs all of us to carry forward. If you have a seat at a major decision making table the community of practice has this to say. Climate finance will deliver transformation or change if we move away from the short term cycles of two to three years we're recommending eight to ten years but longer for those who are willing to take the risk for long-term transformational change and previous speakers have spoken eloquently about the locality adaptation as well as life they are and these are spaces to watch as already communicated now the narrative that sustainability of our initiatives should be passed only to the government or private sector institutions in vulnerable countries to deliver the top-down planned programs clearly is not working well. Some of the assumptions are very wrong and we should be courageous enough to face that fact. To build a resilient world we should pass the tools to the people and I'm really glad that Mohammed has emphasized that. We need tools and institutions that grassroot communities can access and shape for themselves. We have to strengthen confidence that is tried and tested at that level. We need markets, we need innovation and we need very importantly to stop putting the burden only to local governments some of who are failing to even raise local revenue that can support planning meetings. So we need an approach that includes the whole of society in the solution starting with local people's priorities and finding ways to bring other actors to support them. So to those of you in decision making spaces this community of practice is challenging you to convene meetings to talk about how to change funding cycles from short term, longer term. We are calling on your courage to bring up the subject in meetings that are convened by others but where it is relevant. Let us do it for this generation but more importantly for the future generation. Will you listen to our call? Well my last message to you is remember to have fun. It's not all work but also some play. I know we're in a virtual meeting but as veterans are linked during those good old days of best best conferences that we should aim to have fun even with such an intense conference and I must warn those of you who are coming for the first time these coming two days are going to be intense. You may need want to commit to meeting at least one new person just to have a light talk, have a light conversation. Perhaps you want to invite someone to your country once we are out of this serious pandemic. Thank you so much Susan. I think we're losing you but an important message to end on there. Really important points about us all being activists in the in the world outside when we leave CBA with some common messages and that message around longer term commitments is as you say absolutely vital. So much harder for communities and communities partners to really make progress if the commitments are short term. You're always having to run and think about the next grant so longer term commitments really important also to have that focus on innovation and those more holistic responses society responses. I'm going to hand over because one of the things Susan asked us to do is have fun so rather than this all be one way we're going to move to Mentimeter and have an opportunity to interact together. So can I hand over to Heather for taking us through a Mentimeter interactive moment. Heather. There can everyone hear me? Thank you so much and thank you to the panelists for kicking us off with some wise reflections there on the opportunity of CBA 15 and the challenge from Susan to not only make a difference in a range of decision making spaces but also have fun while we're here together. I am Heather McCrae and I direct the Climate Justice Resilience Fund. We are one of the core sponsors of the CBA 15 conference and I hope some of you have used Mentimeter before. This is one tool that we're experimenting with in order to make our online conference a little bit more interactive. We're curious to know what ideas and aspirations and challenges and priorities all of you are bringing to the conference this week and if you go to this website here that's shown on your screen menti.com you can enter this code and we're going to have a couple of questions for you so that we can all get a sense of the room just a sense of of everyone at the conference and what their questions and priorities are. Maybe we can get the next slide here to show us the Mentimeter is that when you go to menti.com you're going to start to see this word cloud which is reflecting the answers that are already coming in. Looks like there's a lot of people who are here for networking people looking for inspiration and new understanding as you answer the question watch this word cloud shift. You can see there's a real diversity but also some some convergence in terms of what it is we're hoping for. I saw the word solutions come up there. Connections people looking for experience learning from experience. We will capture this word cloud when it when it settles down and be able to share it out with everyone. It's good to see everyone's aspirations coming together here. New ideas this is a conference that draws from action and we hope all of you will bring your experience with action. Feel free to share any reflections in the zoom chat as well as you take a look at this this word cloud if there are there ideas that you have that don't seem to be rising to the top it might be interesting to bring them to people's attention on the chat. We really want to have an active chat for this conference. Inspiration that is a key one here for many of us coming to a conference. Looks like our cloud is stabilizing. There may be a few more answers coming in but why don't we take a look at our second question. If you haven't yet on the mentee move on to the second question. Here it is. What should the priorities of a community of practice on locally led adaptation be in the next decade? With this mentee question we're asking you all to think long term to imagine yourselves coming to CBA 25 instead of 15. What will we have achieved? What priorities will we have accomplished by then? Here's some words popping up here. Nature Day solutions, innovation, finance for locally led adaptation, finance I'm sure is going to be a common theme this week. Louder farmers voices. This is often about raising voices isn't it? Green COVID recovery. I think we're going to hear a lot about COVID this week. It's coming into everything and your thoughts on how we move adaptation from a community led perspective into COVID recovery is really important. Leadership and indigenous knowledge on CBA for communities. Cross sector collaboration. A power shift that sees more local leadership. By 10 years we will have empowered local indigenous communities with resources to direct their own long term programs. Clarity on the rules of the most powerful with respect to the needs of the most vulnerable. That would be an achievement. Reconciling the mitigation and adaptation divide for more integrated solutions. I'm just reading a few here. There's a lot of great ideas and our team behind the scenes will be trying to sort these over the course of the week and maybe report back to all of you. Power and money for local leadership and ideas. Ecosense I wonder what that means. Growth. Replication. Getting finance to the local level to address adaptation and provide lessons from practice. Respect for indigenous knowledge. And working toward a power shift that sees more local actors and decision making roles. Power is popping up quite a bit here. This is a tall agenda for our community but having made it this far 15 years, 15 CBA conferences. The next 10 years should be exciting and there's a lot to chew on here. I hope all of you will have really have a thought about what you'd like to see this community do for its next 10 years and what priorities should be. Here's our third question and those of you who were replying to the second one, be sure to move on to the third one on the Mentimeter poll. This one is really about this year, the super year that Claire referred to. It's an important one for international negotiations and as a locally led community of practice, what are the most important outcomes for adaptation practitioners from COP26? This one's multiple choice and you're going to see a bar graph appear as more and more people answer this question on Mentimeter. It looks like so far most people are calling for greater transparency and accountability of climate finance and climate action. But there's also, of course, that finance question, a commitment to increased adaptation funding. Accessibility of adaptation funding, progress on loss and damage, a formal commitment to locally led adaptation, commitment to integrate climate nature and poverty, and a commitment to greater tolerance of risk in the delivery of climate finance. Let's watch this bar graph shift here. See what rises to the top over the next few minutes. If you haven't yet moved on in the Mentimeter, move on to the third question here. Okay. It looks like the call from this community to the COP is for greater transparency and accountability of climate finance and climate action, first and foremost. Secondly, increased accessibility of adaptation funding, and third, a formal commitment to locally led adaptation. If there's a chance, we might do this poll again at the end of the conference and see if conversations this week shift your thinking at all around what our priority should be this year and for the next 10 years. Thank you to everyone who's taken part in our Mentimeter poll. Thank you to Sam and the others running the polling for us and getting this rolling. We've, I think, as a community gotten better at some of these online tools. If any of you missed a question or didn't get to participate or had an idea a little bit too late for the poll, feel free to add it into the chat. We'd love to hear what you're thinking. We'd love to see more and more exchange like this within the community and within the conference. And this, of course, is the opening plenary. But as we move into parallel sessions and smaller groups, there's going to be more and more opportunity to hear in your voices and to bring your ideas into the floor. I hope this will kick off a highly interactive and creative conference and we'll get back to you on the outcomes of this polling later in the week. Back to Claire and Sam. Thank you everyone for taking part in the poll. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Heather. That was fascinating and actually very reassuring. I thought the fact that the first four were around transparency and accountability, increasing accessibility of climate finance, fitting to local load adaptation, and increasing finance overall was incredibly aligned to some of the work that this community has in fact been doing over the last few months. So, yeah, I think that's an exciting indicator that we're on the right track. We're doing the right things together and that this week will be another opportunity for us to bring that experience, thinking together and begin to influence the next six months of this super year. So, if I could ask my panellists to come back onto the screen. So, I'll just keep going. I think hopefully, although I can't see you, Dr. Mises Behr, Susan and Grace. So, we had the Climate and Development Ministerial in the end of March and at that many of these same issues were raised. In fact, all four of those top four that I noted just earlier came out of that ministerial process as well. And there is a follow-up to that. There's access to finance task force, all about improving the way that countries are accessing finance. And there's going to be regional peer-to-peer learning workshops under the Adaptation Action Coalition, which we'll be trying to ensure that this community of practice are able to engage with and influence over the coming few months. We heard about CBA having lessons from your initial remarks. Susan, you talked about the importance of longer-term partnerships. Grace about more holistic responses and Indigenous knowledge. And we also just heard from through the Mentimeter about the importance of power or finance of addressing those underlying issues like local tenure. Do you have any thoughts on what we could be collectively doing over this week and how we might seek to influence some of those follow-ups to the Climate and Development Ministerial? Does anyone want to come in first, Dr. Mises? Thank you very much. I would also again congratulate the team for the great inputs given to the Mentimeter. Quite encouraging that it fits with the priorities that all of us have been saying. I think one of the key important points is how we mobilize support for locally-led adaptation. While I feel that still we are talking about it in reality on the ground, the real support is still inadequate. And how do we therefore use our coming forum that how we really translate the conversation, dialogue, or even the commitment into action? That's one of the issues. And we have to acknowledge that it is not easy. It's an easier thing to say, but when you talk about transformation, it's about talking about changing the power, shifting the power. It's also about making sure that it's not only finance, for example, goes down, but also how are we making sure that at the local level who is making decisions about using those resources. Even within the local level, there's a power structure. And therefore, we have to make sure that at the end, the voices of those who are really facing the struggles, women, the girls, the youth, the group of people living with marginalization and struggling with the impact of climate change, they have the voice as well as ability to act. It's not simple participation if we want them to play the leadership role. So how do we use this forum that is coming up to make sure that we translate our commitment into action? And that's something I'll be focusing on. Thank you. Hey, thank you, Darcynwys. I am putting the voice of the youth involved. Grace, sorry, please. Yes. In addition to that, of course, I already mentioned that this is a community-based adaptation. So what we are asking for is more support for a programmatic and a medium to long-term funding support for local adaptation initiatives. And of course, I always emphasize that there should be integration of local traditional knowledge systems and practices into the climate change adaptation programs and strategies. Yes, I definitely support what had been said in the Mentimeter. Thank you. Thanks, Grace. Another question that I had for the panellys. We had the G7 over the weekend. It was overall a very disappointing outcome on climate action for the poorest countries' priorities, although we have now heard that both Canada and Germany have come out with late climate finance commitments, which is fabulous. Dr Musi, you were talking about getting finance to the local level with more predictability as being top priorities. What do you think this community can do to drive that ambition collectively? You know, at the end, it's about accountability and the accountability delivered to this community. I know that there are hesitations and there are hesitations, there are skepticism, and it's about often local communities' capacity. So I think one of the investments therefore should be on building local institutions. Capacity building itself is one of the areas where the focus should be there and that commitment should be there. We all should be doing there for more and more advocacy. I think from our side, we should be doing more and more advocacy to help this community to understand. You are referring to G7. One of the reasons is possibly, I was thinking that have we done our part adequately to really bring evidence-based advocacy to help the decision makers understand that investment here, including investment in building local institutions, so that they can really lead this local leader position is an important area. So I would say that that's one of the key things. Let's advocate together collectively and based on that evidence we have. Yeah, yeah, important. Grace, we're coming up. We're going to have the UN General Assembly in September, which will be the next big moment for all the climate finance contributors coming together. Susan was talking about the importance of really long-term commitments. We heard also from you about the need for these more holistic responses, bringing together climate and nature. What would you really like to see coming out of the out of anger? Do you think there's something that this community could be discussing this week to really put pressure on those larger countries, the richer countries, to help the poorest? Of course, as I emphasised in my intervention, it is really imperative that we have to integrate this traditional knowledge and contributions on nature-based solutions, which has been practised by indigenous peoples, women and local communities for the past years or for generations, as I said. Of course, I would want that in community-based adaptation programs, they should be integrated as we know that climate change adaptation should really be based on nature-based solutions and contributions of local communities. Indigenous peoples, as well as the women and the intergenerational knowledge transfer to the young generation. Thank you. We got one question from the chat around risk. In the priorities, we had something around being more risk tolerant. The question in the chat is, who's risk are we talking about? Are we talking about the local adaptation finance that communities aren't trustworthy or responsible? Are we talking about the climate finance contributors being prepared to trust more, give communities more opportunity to prove themselves, if you like? What do you think the answer to that is, Grace? Yeah, it's really very challenging for indigenous peoples and local communities to access these climate funds. And really, and honestly, we can only access these funds through other intermediary organisations who are really supportive of our own initiatives and who have built some confidence and trust from us that we can do it as local communities and indigenous peoples. But still, it's very difficult and very challenging really to have direct access on these at this point in time. So I hope in community-based adaptation programs, we will look forward into how we can simplify requirements or whatever fiduciary standards are being required that indigenous peoples and local communities could not really reach or cannot comply with and to make some adjustments on this so that we will really become direct partners and not really simply as beneficiaries in this adaptation and this climate finance that are available at hand but cannot be reached by the local communities and indigenous peoples. Thank you very much. Thank you, Grace. You've raised a couple of really important points there. One about the role of intermediaries and what intermediaries should be doing and the other about can, we heard from the LDC chair about the LDC initiative for effective adaptation of resilience, which is around trying to get direct access for those LDC countries, but then they're seeking to get 70% of that finance down to communities into the hands of local communities, indigenous peoples to actually be able to prioritise. But there's a question, Dr Moussa, around whether we could have civic led, whether we could have civil society led direct access instruments. Tell me what you feel about that and whether civil society has to play a different role also in being a good intermediary when they're connecting international levels to the local level. Yeah, this locally led and globally engaged is the concept we have been working for quite some time now and I can only share some of the practical experience we had by trying to do that. Civil society organisations are most critical, both getting things done in the right way on the ground in the culture in a locally adaptable way. They also have the local knowledge to really come together, to really connect to the global level, to really move. However, there's a need, there's a need for building coalition. You cannot have civil society organisations, a few of civil society organisations to be able to influence decisions, influence resource allocation, everything. So building this coalition, having collective voices, require some facilitation activities and that's what I was basically going back to the original point discussed last time, last few minutes ago about the role of intermediary. Often we talk about role of intermediary as if it's only grants, channeling grants and I think those days are over. That's why intermediary is only channel grants and take stock of making sure that financing and accounting are done. The more important role would be therefore the intermediary, who can play that role of that missing middle, where they come together and really bring the civil societies together, learn from them to begin with. Learning is first and most important second, build collective coalition with honesty and act as a honest broker to really bring those voices collectively with civil society organisation to the places where decisions are made. I would like to mention here one thing, since I'm getting the opportunity to talk about this learning. Dr Salim Hulok often talks about this longer term learning journey and we often think that what it is all about, that's actually part of the mutual capacity building and that's one part of it, that if we really want to work with civil society organisations, we need to learn from those civil society organisations first so that with respect, with humbliness and therefore we also bring the learning from others as good cross-partiliser and can bring them together and that puts us in a better position that way we build this coalition to really influence the decisions and actions of policy makers, resource allocators and that's her collective work and play that role. I hope that gives some of the perspective that I would. Thank you, thank you so much. So just to note that Susan is still with us, she's going to be contributing in the chat as she says she's been gagged by internet access so internet access clearly has to be one of our priorities if we're going to do more of these virtual engagements but it is wonderful to have everyone come together without having to use any carbon in flights and have this conversation. So a couple of more questions coming from the floor is one around how to get to real scale in these approaches. We know that it's very easy to do really good work at really small scale, much harder to get to real scale and get nationwide. That is again just going back to the elderly chairs opening remarks, that is very much what the elderly group trying to do. They know that they're the nice vulnerable 70% of worldwide deaths are caused by climate-related disasters in LDCs although they don't experience the most, the most climate impacts, they're still the ones that are experiencing greatest there from climate impacts. So we do need to really get to scale. Do we have answers to that do you think? I wonder who wants to go first? Grace, maybe. Do you think we can get to real scale with locally led adaptation? Yes, definitely. As already mentioned earlier, of course there's need for capacity building, strengthening local organisations and building from there and I also believe that partnerships and networking and alliances is really effective also as well for local communities and indigenous peoples to be able to access climate finance and other logistical support that they would need. Working with local governments is also helpful if there are opportunities for support that they can mobilise to support locally led initiatives. Yes, I think I'll end there. Okay, so actually just touched on the role of local governments because that was another question in the chat. What do we think that local governments are part of the locally led adaptation actors? So to me, Sir, on the role of local governments and how we're going to really get to scale. Yeah, thank you. I follow on what Grace has been talking about and then I come to local government. Actually, in addition to what she mentioned, this taking to the scale required a systems approach, systems based approach I would say, and which begins at multiple levels of the global system, where we make sure that the locally led adaptation really gets support through systemic processes, which include at the multinational level, you make sure the resource allocations are done as part of the budgeting processes as the allocation processes at the national level that when the national budgets are done, it's kind of channel to that as a formal mechanism. And then that must trickle down. And that systems approach is kind of, therefore, you deal with it in a way that automatically by policy, by mechanisms, by your commitment and resourcing, it gets translated. And that's one of the way to go. And that's why I brought this up head focus. Now come to the question of, and then of course I also support the idea that in addition to system based approach, partnership is another key thing that you partner with partner very well. These are the two ways you go. One other thing I would like to say, when I say systems, I also mean not only government system, but also market based system. You know, we sometimes forget about the fact that we are in a market driven world now. And how do we really work with a market based approach that allows us to really take this local layer reputation further forward. And it becomes part of the integral part of the businesses, integral part of the markets. And that that's an important idea. Now local government, local government is both should be both a supporter, financial capacity builder, and actually hold themselves accountable to the local communities to make sure that the resources that are coming to the local locality are used by the decisions, by the actions of the local leadership. So local government sometimes can become an isolated entity in itself if really they're distant from the local real local leadership, if their decisions are not actually owned also by the local communities. So local government has an opportunity that by definition they're near to the people. They have an opportunity to really go out to the community and sit with them. Nowadays, we are quite familiar with some of the good participatory tools by using those tools. You can really make sure that local communities not only participate, but also own some of the decisions that local government will take. They can they can be honest about it and therefore really put forward the resources and support to the local communities to lead this. Local government also needs support from the national government in order to be able to do that. And that support needs building local government's capacity to be able to support local lead actions. Local government's capacity should not be just taken as granted. It has to be built to be able to really lead local lead adaptation. And that's why there is a kind of role that national governments and capacity building institution and the role of communities like us who we have, we can engage the local government to be able to help them enable that thing happen. Thank you. So Susan's interventions in the chat, she's just noted that COP26 ministerial brought out some important solutions, but it's a clear need to increase integrate transparency of climate finance in order to support the accessibility, improving the accessibility in the proposed access to finance task force, an important point there. She also is agreeing with you both on how to get to real scale. She agrees with the argument of partnerships and notes that in the coming days there's quite a lot on learning coming out from the sessions on demonstrating the partnerships across community, private sector governments to inspire scale up and to ensure the sustainability adaptation action. So another question that's come out is, is there a preference between the type of locally led adaptation that takes place? Is NBS by its very nature better than a technology led adaptation approach? And there's also questions around how we can use the internet and learning through digitally to begin to learn across scales, both across countries, across communities, as well as vertically between communities and high levels. So some thoughts on that. Do you have an instinctive preference for NBS over any form of technology or does it depend on the circumstance of what needs to happen and what do you see as the opportunities for digital learning for this community practice? Grace, do you want to go first? Yeah, for indigenous peoples and local communities it's really again another challenge with this pandemic and we're in, we are more or less more connected with internet and and it's really a great challenge for all of us. Some of the activities that we are supposed to do locally have not been achieved for this season within this situation for our pandemic. So we do it through partnerships. We have partners at the community level. We work through local governments as well and try to see how to connect at the local level or how the local level can connect at the sub-national to national level through these partnerships that we build. We also conduct dialogues among various sectors, among various partners and try to come up with some actionable strategies that can really respond to the situation, to the difficult situation that we have now. Yes, I know there are some, there are successful stories even within this situation. Communities and indigenous peoples continue to have their locally led adaptation activities and programs and they have their own initiatives and efforts to really respond to the situation at their own pace and at their own capacity because of limited support systems at this point in time. Yeah. Yeah, thank you guys. That's my son. You know I would say that you know that COVID-19, while it was one of the worst experience of all of us in the last one and a half year, did open up some opportunities for us to test some innovations and learning, especially around digital means to extension. We tried in various programs including our community-based programs and our experience has been quite amazing that you can reach to the people at a scale and even facilitate collectivisation of the people even when maintaining social distancing to do things collectively that you need to be done. So that was quite an amazing and interesting experience it can be done. I agree with Chris that we have to be mindful that not every place still have the internet connectivity adequately but my gut feeling is the way the internet penetration is happening, the last part of the people will be in reach soon and even in business people in various communities. Question is, are we reaching in the way that they find meaningful, they find useful, it's not just reach, it's also reach in the way that help them to come together. So that's one comment but I would also like to take another comment in this regard. This locally-led adaptation should not be understood as a technical problem only. There are technicalities into it, financial technical. It's also a social, it's basically a power issue which is political and social aspects of it which would not underestimate. Sometime we forget that maybe a technical solution will solve everything but that's not the case. Our personal experiences and our national experiences in that as much as it's technical, it's also political and social in that sense and over there unless we really make sure that we have appropriate methodologies to deal with that and actually not only methodologies we have, are we really acting on that together? Then you cannot bring those technical and socio-political aspects together and cannot really make the proper difference that we are. I feel as, thank you. I think that's really important and that's a view that Susan's also suggesting in the chat, we shouldn't have preferences, we're running out of time getting to 1.5 degree scenario too fast and we just need to scale up as much as what works as possible simultaneously. I think the point about this all being about power is another thing that's come out in the chat but it's again suggesting that it's not always so simple that local governments can work with communities, sometimes they don't have very much power either so it is actually a matter of us really beginning to tackle with these thorny issues in multiple places. So just a final, one minute final word from each of you if you would, what would you like to see coming out of CPA 15 and Susan if you wouldn't mind doing so on the chat as well. Doctor Miso, why don't we start with you this time? No, I think I will be building on what I was saying last time that it's time for us to take this head on and don't shy away from the fact that we are, we have been a little bit conservative on this. We are talking about dealing with this locality adaptation in a way that is okay to let some of it go at a level that's going now. We are talking about really making fundamental shift. We are talking about transformation. Who decides about where the adaptation resources will be used and why it is decided? Why is the voice of those who are living at the forefront in this whole decision-making process? Are we sure that we are honest and genuine about getting the ownership of the decisions of our adaptation at the hand of the people who are at the forefront? Or are we just talking about keeping it as tokenistic? I would like to see that in the CPA 15. We are touching some of these difficult questions. Let's talk about the elephant in the room and let's not shy away from that if we really want to make the difference. It's a great opportunity for coming here in the CPA 15. I feel again humble. There are much more knowledgeable and professionals here than me and so I feel a little shy that I am talking here. My humble position would be less not shy away from doing things that needs to be done. It's time to be at a speed and at a scale. Thank you very much. For me, as I emphasized already in my intervention a while ago, even with this climate crisis, even with this pandemic situation, indigenous peoples and local communities were able to adapt on whatever way that they can because they are nature-based people and they maximized the opportunities that nature offers them and they have their own indigenous and local community perspectives on how to really maximize these opportunities that nature is providing them. It's really very important to integrate nature-based solutions in every action that we do, especially at local levels. Of course, as I also mentioned, respect of rights and the interests and the self-determination of local communities and indigenous people should also be acknowledged in this whole process so that we can do whatever we can to contribute into this climate crisis and in this pandemic situation. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Grace. A really important concept is self-determination in many ways. That is the heart of locally led adaptation. That respect of rights and interests chiam is very much with Dr. Moose's call for tackling the elephant in the rim. NBS being actually a natural solution for communities very often. They may not even know about technological solutions that might help, but they know the nature-based solutions ones and that's part of the need to translate, to bring all of those different forms of knowledge together so they have a full range of options to choose from. Salim Huck is of course the grandfather of CBA noted in the chat that every governance system has tensions between different actors, national and local officials, and the opportunity to find allies with local government and lobby national government is there. I think that's also an important closing remark. Susan Nandudu is pointing out the innovative nature of solutions that are coming from the voice of indigenous peoples, young people, when they're brought to the decision-making table that can really help advance adaptation action at greater scale if that finance resources and rights to make those decisions are given. So thank you very much. That was absolutely wonderful start to CBA. It has to be one of my favourite moments of the year when we all come together. I hope we're not going to have too many technical difficulties over the year, but obviously we are all joining from very different levels of brand board bandwidth, so we're going to have to be tolerant with each other. There are also Slack channels and so on, so even if you're struggling to have the conversation in the room when your video has to be off so that you can hear and so on, there are other ways to engage. So let me hand over, thank my panellists very much, Dr Musa, Grace Balorag and Susan Nandudu, who's managed to engage even though internet didn't allow her to speak. Hand over to Sam about all the different ways this CBA is going to be running over this week. Thanks so much, Claire. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks very much to our panellists for a really lively and interactive discussion, and to everybody also feeding in on the chat. I want to share some really exciting opportunities with you just before we close today and we go on to think about the conference. So firstly, I want to introduce you to the catalytic grants. So thanks to the Global Resilience Partnership and the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, we have the opportunity to share with you a grant to develop an idea. So if you are taking part in CBA, you're in a session, you're in a Skillshare, you're on a Slack channel and you get chatting to somebody in which you have an interesting idea. Funding is available for you to take that idea further. You could get up to £5,000. All you have to do is submit your idea after CBA 15 through an application form and what we really want to encourage is collaborations of teams from different organisations on innovative ideas and winners can receive seed funding, support, access to knowledge and tools. To find out more information, there is a video on the main page in the atrium of the conference platform and that's where I'm going to take us to now just to share a little bit about how you can interact at CBA and some things that it's really worth bearing in mind today before the major session starts tomorrow. So I'm going to stop sharing this screen and share a different one. So what you're looking at now is the conference platform. So what you're looking here is the agenda. Now this agenda is searchable by theme and you can search by track, gender and mail or you can search by type of session. So all of this is fully searchable. Now the first thing I want to draw your attention to today is the coffee chats. Now these are networking chats. You can be matched with somebody by interest and by language and you will be randomly put together with somebody where you can chat about what you're interested in. So I was noting and really pleased to see that during the word cloud on the Mentimeter everybody's one of the major priorities was on networking. Now the coffee chat is exactly for that. Bring a drink. You can talk for as little or as long as you want. You can even invite other people into your chat. So please do sign on for the coffee chats. There is one at three o'clock British summertime and another one later on. It'd be really, really great to see you. I myself had a couple of really fascinating conversations already this morning and I really hope that I get to have a few more with others later on. The second thing I want to urge you to do is to remember to sign up for your sessions and it's really, really easy to do. Now signing up is important because it lets us know how many people are coming but it's also necessary so that you can see the zoom link for the session so that you can join it. So if I just click on this session here, if I visit that and scroll down I can hit sign up to session here and we can actually see this one is already filling up and once I'm signed up that is going to make sure that the zoom link is shared with me on this session page 20 minutes before the session. So please remember today before all the sessions start have a look through see what you're interested in and please sign up to the sessions that you are intending to go to in order to get the zoom link. If you change your mind and you can't then attend the session you just hit release my seat and that will create the space again for somebody else. So if you do find that you're not able to go to a session please just come back in the session page click the button and that's going to free up the space so that somebody else can join. The last thing I want to draw your attention to is the Slack community boards. Now anybody that remembers last year on Hoover we had a community board discussion and over 10,000 messages were shared now we can do that again this year but the nice thing is that our Slack community boards will continue after the conference. So if there is something at CBA that isn't being discussed that you think is important something that should be part of the program but there hasn't been space for please join us on Slack you can start your own conversation about it you can even let us know that you want to set up your own miniature round table discussion on the topic and you can share any messages that come from that discussion with us so please do explore the CBA workspaces there are already really interesting conversations happening about climate resilience about monitoring and evaluation about transformation and more and it's a really great way to network and connect with others. So with that I want to thank everybody who's joined us for the opening plenary today I want to thank our panellists again for a really interesting discussion and I'm really looking forward to meeting you and for the discussions that will take place over the next few days. Thank you very much and have a great CBA.