The impact of climate change and El Niño is increasingly causing coral reefs to bleach. WWF’s Friends of the Reef project is an effort to protect Asia Pacific’s coral reef ecosystems, which are the source of new coral recruits for reefs throughout the region and a source of livelihood for coastal people, especially in the fishery and tourism sectors. Friends of the Reef engages local stakeholders and decision makers in developing, testing, and implementing plans to increase coral reef resilience to major threats in the region, including climate change.

The waru waru restoration project began in 1991 in the southern Andean department of Puno, Peru.  The aim is to recover a technology, invented by the Tiahuanaco culture, that fell into disuse around 1100 A.D.  Archaeological excavations of raised fields demonstrated that farmers began constructing them by 1000 BC.  Waru waru, or raised field, agriculture makes it possible to bring into production the low-lying, floodprone, poorly drained lands found all over the Altiplano.  The project involves the restoration of earthworks that are central to the technology.

In 2004, GTZ started a project entitled “Adaptation to Climate Change through Risk Management” with selected rural communities on the south-western Pacific coast and in the autonomous North Atlantic Region with the aim of improving their capacity to adapt to climate change by means of strengthened disaster risk management.  The project also sought to integrate this capacity into their planning processes. One part of the project was conducted with indigenous Miskito communities along the Rio Tungky in the Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic.

Chitwan is the most flood prone among the districts of Nepal.  People regularly experience losses of land, property and biodiversity as well as food shortages.  The Intermediate Technology Development Group implemented a community-based disaster management program in cooperation with DIPECHO (Disaster Preparedness program of the European Commission Humanitarian aid Office) to reduce the impact of floods by strengthening the capacity of local communities to set up early warning systems.

This UNDP project seeks to implement priority country-driven strategies to adapt to climate-induced coastline erosion within the framework of integrated coastal area management planning, through a combination of demonstration projects, integration of climate change into coastal management policies, capacity building initiatives including training, stakeholder consultations, climate and coastline erosion monitoring mechanisms, as well as  the promotion of regional cooperation.

The goal of this project, implemented by Action Aid, is to reduce people’s vulnerability to natural disasters by contributing to the implementation of the Hyogo framework. The purpose is to make schools in high-risk disaster areas safer, enabling them to act as a locus for disaster risk reduction. The project works in 7 countries in selected districts at high-risk of diverse natural disasters.

The purpose of this SouthSouthNorth project is to demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of using renewable energy technologies (solar photovoltaic and wind pumping systems) for rural development objectives in contributing to the improvement of water supply coverage for rural communities. Activities will begin with an assessment of the strength of droughts and the relationship of droughts to water supply (conducted by interviewing community members) and a consideration of the potential of groundwater in these areas to alleviate shortages.

The objective of this government project is to develop and pilot a range of coping mechanisms for reducing the vulnerability of farmers and pastoralists to future climate shocks.

The National University of Mongolia and other partner are developing local adaptation strategies of the coupled social-environmental system to climate change in the Mongolian rangelands. Spatially large landscape is critical in arid lands to offset climate variability.  A fragmentation of the cultural landscapes in the arid and semi-arid lands of Mongolia has increased vulnerability. Therefore, this project will try to reinstate traditional land use practices, while supplementing these with knowledge of adaptive land management.

Climate Adaptation from the Bottom-up: Collaboration between Malian Communities and Scientific Organizations to Identify and Implement Responsive Water Management Actions is a project that works at the community level to encourage discussion about the best method to present information on climate change impacts and risk gained through public-participation-GIS to community members. It also disseminates this information through materials (e.g. posters, videos, etc) and presentations designed to elicit potential adaptation strategies.