As an urban planner in Kenya, I’ve participated in many planning processes. They usually begin in neat boardrooms, with maps, policy reviews, and stakeholder workshops. Homa Bay, on the shores of beautiful Lake Victoria, was different. 

Direct health sector adaptation interventions will require over US$ 22 billion per year by 2035. The Belém Health Action Plan calls for national strategies that address the root causes of health inequity, and are based on a common taxonomy, shared standards for assessing effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, a focus on local context and scalability, and sustained investment.

Only a tiny fraction of global climate finance actually reaches or is led by the communities who are on the frontlines of climate change. Despite growing international support for locally led adaptation, current reporting systems are so limited that less than half a percent of funding can be confidently identified as truly locally driven.

How can we redefine “success” in climate adaptation beyond easily countable project outputs? What mechanisms are most effective in bridging the gap between local knowledge and national policy? Why is funding still missing the local actors who deliver the most impact?

Find out in the 2025 Stories of Resilience!

The four winners of the 2025 Local Adaptation Champions Awards show how communities are turning heritage, healing, and local ingenuity into powerful tools for survival and renewal. Their stories reveal that climate resilience is strongest when it grows from the lived experience, leadership, and resolve of those on the frontlines.

The Green Climate Fund’s Locally Led Climate Action framework provides guidance on developing projects that devolve decision-making and finance, support local ownership and implementation, and build sustainable local capacity. It also provides a menu of options for structuring proposals in line with these parameters.

This report amplifies the voices of displaced communities in Bangladesh, exploring how climate-driven loss and damage intersect with protracted displacement and highlighting civil society efforts toward durable solutions. It features a case study on the work GCA and its partners did with the communities in Mongla Municipality.

Extreme heat in Delhi worsens the health, livelihoods, and mental well-being of more than 300,000 homeless individuals, revealing how lack of adequate housing magnifies climate and psychological stress. Addressing these impacts requires meeting basic needs, building community support systems, expanding access to mental health care, and implementing housing-centered, climate-resilient policies across all levels of government.

Bangladesh’s coastal towns face rising seas, cyclones, and floods that threaten homes and livelihoods, forcing many to migrate to already overburdened Dhaka. Strengthening smaller “secondary towns” offers a safer, more resilient alternative. Through People’s Adaptation Planning, communities—supported by the the Global Center on Adaptation and BRAC—are turning local knowledge into actionable plans for an inclusive and climate-resilient future.

Social protection investments can be a powerful driver of rural climate adaptation and just transitions for the most vulnerable. A review of 23 Green Climate Fund (GCF) projects shows strong potential to scale up these investments while enhancing coordination, inclusion, and long-term support. Strengthening national social protection systems alongside these efforts could make GCF investments even more inclusive, sustainable, and just.

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.

By embracing the principles of locally led adaptation, funders can cut through red tape and give local stakeholders control over how climate solutions are designed and funded. This toolkit lays out practical, simplified actions to help institutions make this shift.

In Kenya’s South Rift, Maasai communities are blending tradition with innovation to restore land and protect wildlife. Through women-led seed banks and rotational grazing, they are building resilience where people, livestock, and nature thrive together.

Of the over 880 million people in the Global South who live in slums, approximately one in three resides in a floodplain. Floods in slums can lead to severe and lasting socioeconomic impacts, such as homelessness, waterborne diseases and mental health issues. Joint endeavors between the government and community members can achieve outcomes beyond traditional flood protection systems and disaster preparedness alone.

Lessons from the Sahel region reveal that scaling up existing social protection programs may be more beneficial to strengthening climate adaptation and resilience than redesigning national systems and programs. Adaptive social protection systems that integrate climate risk offer a practical way to help communities cope with the impacts of climate change.

The Step Change initiative accelerates equitable and inclusive locally led adaptation by fostering southern leadership and climate knowledge brokering. Step Change aims to grow the number of organizations and individuals with the skills to close knowledge-to-action gaps in gender equality and social inclusion, in enhancing access to climate finance, and improving ecosystem-based adaptation.

Roughly 490,000 deaths are attributable to heat annually, yet mortality is only the tip of the iceberg. In many countries, formal data often fails to capture the full scope of heat-related impacts. Community-based surveys and interviews are essential for critical insight into health and social consequences that are otherwise missed, and to identify unrecognized symptoms, capture indirect effects, and highlight vulnerable groups.

Tapping into the knowledge and experience of people in informal settlements is vital to shaping effective investments for climate adaptation in highly complex urban environments. Communities have a vital role as holders of information not captured in official statistics. Community-led data collection can provide disaggregated data for better targeting and delivery of climate adaptation programs; provide new insights into the contexts and conditions for project delivery; and add value to World Bank project context analysis.

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.

Effectively protecting children from the adverse effects of climate change requires considering the interconnectedness of their needs and replacing siloed work with integrated action. Here are some key insights on how children have been impacted in West Bengal, India and how climate action can better respond to their unique vulnerabilities.

In the heart of South Africa’s Kalahari Desert, the Pella Food Garden Cooperative—a women-led vegetable production project—struggled to sustain its drought-ravaged land. To combat this crisis, INMED South Africa introduced aquaponics—a cost-effective, sustainable farming method that merges fish farming (aquaculture) with soilless crop production (hydroponics) in a closed, climate-resilient system. These systems use 90% less water than conventional agriculture, rely on rainwater harvesting, and minimize energy use.

Record-breaking extreme heat, reaching 40 to 50°C, is threatening lives, livelihoods, and economies across the Asia-Pacific region. Proposed solutions range from developing and expanding heat forecasting informed by real-time data to empowering community-led initiatives that integrate traditional knowledge with modern science. Given that this threat is not unique to any single country, it is critical that the Asia-Pacific collectively strengthens coordination, deepens community involvement and protects vulnerable populations.

Climate change is a significant challenge for smallholder farmers in northeast Madagascar, where 94% of farmers surveyed reported impacts due to temperature rise and 91% due to reduced rainfall. 57% expect to have much less food, and 35% somewhat less food, to feed their families in the future due to these changes. Yet adaptation is limited by existing socioeconomic inequalities involving access to market activities and gender.

Plenty of research suggests that national and local actors are much better placed to identify and respond to protection concerns in disaster response and need to be better resourced and supported to do so. This research paper outlines the findings from Vanuatu, Tonga and Solomon Islands on the interface between localization and protection in the Pacific, and seeks to better understand the combination of local, national and international roles that can provide the best possible protection outcomes for affected people in disasters.

Large-scale adoption of sustainable land management and nature-based solutions to drought is not a standalone transformation – it is an integral part of rethinking how we value land and relearning how to manage land sustainably. A whole-of-society approach can ensure the voices and experiences of all actors and those most impacted by droughts are considered, helping improve coordination on drought preparation, response, recovery, and adaptation.