Impacts of climate change on poor and vulnerable communities affect their life and livelihood in a decisive manner. With the limited resources and knowledge, the communities make an effort to reduce their vulnerability and to adjust with the mounting climate impacts. With the support of local institutions, local government, civil society and local solutions, the communities have a fighting chance to mitigate and adapt to climate impacts.
Local solutions are crucial elements of climate action at local level. Affordability, accessibility, acceptability and replicability are some of its inherent characteristics. The local solutions are affordable by poor and vulnerable commuities because of its low purchase and maintenance cost. At times, the affordability is because of availability of finances to adopt the solutions or the sales designing making it affordable.The solutions have to be easility available through its delivery channels even in the rural markets. The repairing and maintenance of these solutons are also need to be available locally. The replicability of the local solutions need to be high for deeper penetration into diverse socio economic and geographic locations. Additionally, it needs to be socially and culturally acceptable for communities for adoption.
Through the Eco Village Development project, INFORSE South Asia and CAN South Asia along with national partners have been engaged with raising the profile of local solutions at policy level. Through evidence-based advocacy, the project partners are pitching for recognition of local solutions to promote sustainable development at national and regional level. The partners have created a repository of solutions in the energy, irrigation, sustainable agriculture and other sectors which could take on climate impacts and at the same time improve livelihood prospect of the communities adopting it.
The Eco Village Development project partners organised a webinar on ”Launch of Online Database of Eco Village Development Project in South Asia”. The objective of the webinar is to launch the repository and invite CSOs in the South Asia region to enrich it with technological and financial solutions, planning methods, publications, and CSOs working on the field. The local solutions are not well recognised in the development planning as compared with the large or centralised solutions.
With the similar or even large local impacts, the local solutions don’t get the policy nod. These solutions remain at pilot level and could never replicated sufficiently to provide the climatic, social and capacity benefits to communities. Moreover, the solutions are not available at one place for a potential adopter to pick and choose as per the need. The repository prepared by Eco Village Development project partners removes this bottleneck by making ait available through a repository. It could act as a platform of sharing information and mutual learning when CSOs adapt appropriate solutions suiting the needs of communities while addressing the climate change issue.
The climate solutions are collated by cooperating regional CSO networks of INFORSE-South Asia and CANSA. The national partners of Eco Village Development project – INSEDA in India. IDEA in Sri Lanka, CRT in Nepal, and Grameen Shakti in Bangladesh who implement climate solutions also contributed their solutions in the repository.
The repository includes close to 40+ solutions in the 6 main Categories from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The main categories are: cooking, off grid power, heating and cooling, water supply, organic gardening and agriculture and village development planning tools. There are about 4 subcategories in each category. The repository also includes publications on the local solutions, training materials, photos and videos, and organisations which are working on the area, and contributed to the database.
The repository is available through https://www.inforse.org/evd/output/solution_list.php
