Assessing adaptation options for climate change: A guide for coastal communities in the Coral Triangle of the Pacific 3. Impact and adaptation assessment workshop

Abstract

Assessing options for adapting to climate change is an important part of building resilient fishing and farming communities. This brochure is part of a series that collectively detail how a community-based assessment of climate change was used in partnership with coastal communities and provincial and national-level stakeholders in Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands. The assessment contains four distinct, but related, steps (Fig 1) focused on supporting community-level decision-making for adaptation through a series of participatory action research activities. Each brochure in this series details a specific activity in the four-step assessment. This series of eight brochures is primarily aimed for use where resources are limited or where it is more appropriate to use a rapid, qualitative and non-data intensive method of assessment. Community leaders, local NGOs and regional and national-level government representatives in developing countries may find this series useful. In this brochure we provide details of an activity relating to the ‘Identifying options’ step of the assessment, namely a two-day impact and adaptation assessment workshop. This activity was conducted with fishers and farmers to consider the importance of climate change to their livelihoods. More specifically, the following questions were posed: • What are the likely impacts of climate change (including climate variability) on important livelihood activities? • What does the community see as a desirable future and hence the focus of adaptation actions? • What adaptation actions are likely to be useful in reducing negative impacts and taking advantage of any opportunities arising from climate change?