Participatory Vulnerability Assessments in support of Community Based Adaption

This publication is derived from a real life exercise in applying participatory vulnerability methods in 11 villages/barangays in the Municipality of Guinayangan , Quezon, Philippines. These villages were among those designated as climate smart villages, under the CCAFS global initiative to set up climate smart villages as platforms for climate-smart agriculture (CSA). The project in the Philippines was entitled “Generating an evidence base for upscaling local adaptation thorough Climate Smart Agriculture “(P56). This compilation includes tools and methods, facilitators guides and the actual outputs from the 9 villages.

These Participatory Vulnerability Assessment (PVA) studies encompass a wider range of components (such as livelihood analysis, and seasonal charts) beyond what is included in desk based, climate vulnerability studies. Gender is prominently featured in these proposed methods and in the derived outputs. These PVA studies, which typically last three days per village, engaged and involved local communities and local government representatives, bringing their perspectives to bear on the problem analysis, thus distinguishing itself from other efforts that rely primarily on secondary data. Data derived from community studies however is ideally also complemented by secondary data derived from desk based studies. Such assessments are regularly revisited and updated. These methods have since already been shared with the Philippines Department of Agriculture and used in trainings and capacity building efforts of the Department of Agriculture Climate Resilient Agriculture Office (DA CRAO) and Agricultural Training Institute (DA ATI).