Extreme heat is reshaping daily life for India’s poorest workers, who have few options but to endure dangerous conditions that threaten their health and livelihoods. Experts say the country must urgently adapt its cities, workplaces and social protections to withstand a hotter future.

At COP30 in Belém, Brazil, four community-led initiatives from Kenya, India, Peru, and a global heritage network received the 2025 Local Adaptation Champions Awards for pioneering responses to climate change. Organized by the Global Center on Adaptation with support from the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the awards spotlight how locally led climate action is driving resilience, from transforming informal settlements through climate-responsive health care to empowering women farmers.

As global leaders grapple with how to fund and scale climate adaptation, this edition of Stories for Resilience calls for a fundamental reset—from short-term projects to long-term power shifts. Offering real-world lessons and tested solutions, it challenges funders and policymakers to rethink what climate leadership looks like in practice.

A co-creation workshop on embedding Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) in Community Driven Development (CDD) was launched today in Tamale, Ghana, to strengthen the integration of LLA methodologies into the community-driven planning and investment processes under the World Bank’s Gulf of Guinea Northern Regions Social Cohesion (SOCO) Project. 

In Bangladesh, rural roads are vital for connecting communities but often worsen flooding and erosion when poorly designed. The Global Center on Adaptation, through the World Bank’s Climate Smart Rural Transport Project, is piloting “Green Roads for Water” to make roads climate-resilient while improving local water management. Central to the effort are Women's Adaptation Labs, where women's leadership is at its core and women collaborate with engineers and hydrologists to shape road designs that boost water security and reduce climate risks.

The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) announced the 20 nominees for the 2025 Local Adaptation Champions Awards today. These prestigious awards, which spotlight groundbreaking and scalable locally led efforts, celebrate innovation in addressing the growing impacts of climate change while fostering resilience at the community level. The nominees have been selected in four categories: Nature-Based Solutions, Women's Livelihoods, Citizen Science, and Health.

Hot classrooms are increasingly undermining education globally—rising temperatures hamper learning, yet many schools are unprepared and cooling solutions are complex. As climate change drives more frequent heatwaves, the need for sustainable, equitable cooling in schools is becoming urgent.

Local government officials and representatives from Tom Mboya University gained hands-on experience in Rapid Climate Risk Assessments by completing them for three informal settlements in Homa Bay Municipality. Their training culminated in a four-day workshop where they deepened their understanding of climate risk and learned how to apply assessments in data-scarce environments, integrate climate resilience into urban planning and leverage nature-based solutions.

Homa Bay County Government has begun preparing a climate change adaptation plan that is directly informed by the People’s Adaptation Plan (PAP) developed by its residents. The latter directly encompasses local knowledge, highlights challenges faced by residents due to climate change and proposes solutions for addressing them. In so doing, the PAP will shape strategies proposed in the climate change adaptation plan and help mobilize funding for implementation.

Homa Bay's People's Adaptation Plan was built from the ground up and shaped by data collected by trained community members. The Plan was directly informed by the local knowledge of the County's citizens and it sets out improvements to reduce vulnerability to floods and extreme weather. As GCA prepares to support the County with officially launching the Plan in August 2025, it calls on other counties—and the international community—to follow Homa Bay’s lead.

For the first time ever, Locally Led Adaptation has been embedded within Bangladesh’s national civil service training framework. All public officials will now be equipped with the knowledge to respond to climate challenges in their respective sectors through inclusive, community-driven approaches. This integration is thanks to GCA's partnership with the Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre and directly supports the country's efforts to strengthen national resilience against climate change.

"If we want real climate resilience, we have to rethink what expertise looks like – it’s not always people behind a desk or text on white paper," young community mobilizer from Homa Bay tells High-Level participants. "Sometimes, it's a 22-year-old in Sofia with a smartphone, using it not to chat but to map flood-prone homes so her neighbors can be seen, counted and protected."

"Many of our communities were invisible before this process," Mercy Lukio, a resident of Sofia, an informal settlement in Homa Bay County, told a High Level Panel during an Intergenerational Dialogue organized by GCA. "Now we’ve mapped over 21,000 households across Homa Bay. That’s not just data—that’s power. We can’t build resilience in places we refuse to see. And we can’t expect youth to drive solutions without equipping us with the resources, the training, and the dignity we deserve."

Damaris Wanjiku, a student from Tom Mboya University, was trained to support the People's Adaptation Planning process in her County, Homa Bay, Kenya. Addressing a High-Level Panel during an intergenerational dialogue organized by the GCA, she called for recognition, partnership, and long-term investment in young people to enable them to support locally led efforts to deal with climate change.

As another punishing summer edges into Karachi, a Stanford researcher and a former climate minister confront the same crisis—extreme heat—from opposite ends of Pakistan’s most populous city.

Senegal’s mangrove forests have been severely depleted, with devasting consequences: vanishing fish habitats, entire villages being washed away by floods, and women losing their main source of income. How can nature-based solutions address all these challenges at once?

One in every five residents in the Bangladeshi city of Narayanganj lives below the poverty line. The city is home to approximately 95 slum clusters and is frequently flooded by heavy rains, leading to life grinding to a halt and residents falling sick from polluted water. However, this is set to change as GCA, with the support of Global Affairs Canada, is facilitating the development of People’s Adaptation Plans, which respond to these challenges and are part of the Asian Development Bank’s US$ 155 million Narayanganj Green and Resilient Urban Development Project.

In Mirsarai, Bangladesh, GCA and its partners are working with nine low-income communities to drive a bottom-up planning process and actively map their climate vulnerabilities. The resulting People's Adaptation Plans aim to guide climate-resilient investments under the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s Bangladesh Smart Cities Development Project. This approach is redefining what it means to be a "smart" city, where it isn't just about digital innovation alone, but about giving a voice to the most vulnerable and building resilience from the ground up.

Community members from Patuakhali, Bangladesh trained faculty members of the Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre on the People’s Adaptation Plan Process and explained how local leadership can make investments in resilience more effective, efficient, and sustainable. This training session took place during a week-long workshop organized by the GCA in Savar, Bangladesh, aimed at developing a course module on locally led adaptation for public administrators across vulnerable sectors in Bangladesh.

The Global Center on Adaptation is organizing a week-long Training of Trainers workshop for faculty members of the Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre, on institutionalizing locally led adaptation (LLA) across sectors in Bangladesh. The workshop initiates a process for developing a comprehensive LLA course module, with support from the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies and the Centre for Participatory Research and Development, which will be embedded in core training programs for Bangladeshi government officials.

The Global Center on Adaptation and the Integrated Research and Action for Development institute held a virtual peer-to-peer learning session that explored integrating Heat Action Plans into the People’s Adaptation Planning process. Participants highlighted how extreme heat is disproportionately affecting women and the urban poor, emphasized the need for community-led documentation of its impact, and called for localized, inclusive, and data-driven urban planning.

In Mongla, Bangladesh, a city marked by climate challenges and economic growth, initiatives like the revived port and Export Processing Zone are reshaping lives. The community of Narikeltola exemplifies resilience, leveraging locally led adaptation to combat environmental stresses and secure a sustainable future.

Representatives of the community, County government and NGOs met recently in Homa Bay to validate the results of a community-led mapping and enumeration process. Data and information collected from over 5000 households during this process will inform the development of People’s Adaptation Plans to make the community, living on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, more resilient to climate change. 

The Global Center on Adaptation is supporting communities in the Copperbelt and Muchinga Provinces of Zambia to develop People's Adaptation Plans to inform investments under the World Bank's Transforming Landscapes for Resilience and Development in Zambia (TRALARD II). GCA collaborated with local partners to pilot the People's Adaptation Planning Process in the two provinces and it is now supporting the development of guidelines to scale up the approach in other TRALARD II project areas.

Representatives from 106 informal settlements in Chattogram, Bangladesh, presented draft People’s Adaptation Plans to the city corporation and other key stakeholders to inform investments under the World Bank’s Chattogram Water Supply and Sanitation Project. With the coastal city of Chattogram facing persistent water insecurity and rising salinity levels, these plans propose community recommendations to improve the water and sanitation services for its low-income residents. In response, the Chattogram Mayor has invited the communities to engage in an iterative planning and implementation process.