 I attended the Adaptation Futures Conference in Cape Town earlier this month and one of the things that really struck me was the prevalence of ecosystem based approaches to adaptation, otherwise known as EBA, throughout the programme. EBA to me is a very exciting concept because it can address not only climate change adaptation challenges, but also climate change mitigation challenges. It can help with poverty reduction and meeting the sustainable development goals, convention on biodiversity goals and also SDGs. So there's real potential there and it's not getting enough support in policy making as we'd like, but to see it so prevalent in the conference programme was very exciting. There was however huge confusion over terminologies. What's the difference between nature based solutions, EBA and eco-disaster risk reduction? Now this is important because unless we're all talking about the same thing, we can't understand what we're talking about and we can't importantly measure effectiveness. If I go to a restaurant and I order ice cream, I can't tell you if the cheesecake is good because I've only had the ice cream so I can only give you evidence on whether the ice cream is good or not. But I don't want to get too head up on terminology. One of the biggest challenges for EBA is actually implementation. There are many challenges to actually practically implementing EBA on the ground. One of them is the cross-sectoral nature of EBA. It requires collaboration between a multitude of government sectors, which in practice is very hard to achieve because governments are managed very sexually. Huge implementation capacity gaps. In many instances, particularly the small line sites, they know what they need to do. They just don't have the manpower to do it. Knowledge gaps as well. Is EBA cost effective? We need a much stronger evidence base to address this. This is one thing that our ecosystem based adaptation project looking to strengthen the evidence and inform policy is working to address. The other challenge is how do we finance EBA and how do we mainstream it into national planning processes? At the conference, I shared two really fabulous examples from South Africa and Kenya on how to do this. In South Africa, the expanded public works programme provides a real opportunity for mainstreaming EBA in a national planning system. In Kenya, at the county level, the ECOLO Climate Change County Fund is already delivering finance to grassroots EBA projects through a mainstreamed county adaptation planning programme. There are a number of tools to do ecosystem based adaptation and as part of our research project on improving the evidence base and informing policy, we've collected more than 200. And yet when we speak to people, it's striking how many people we speak to who say, we need more tools. How do we do ecosystem based adaptation? We need more tools to help us. Actually, with more than 200 out there, our feeling is that we don't need more tools. We need to share the tools that we have a bit better. And to that end, we're working with our partners WCMC to develop a navigator so that people can access these tools and get information about which ones they can use that will be most appropriate to them. This will be available shortly.