Your thoughts - Michael Nanua Senior Journalism Student – Vanuatu Institute of Technology

How can we make bottom-up planning for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction more effective?

Quick definition of Bottom up planning – Planning is to start from the community and then this is worked through different levels so it ultimately get folded into national plans.

Rebecca McLean

AUSAID, Suva Fiji

I think the bottom up planning for climate change adaption and disaster risk reduction will be more effective if the governments build a good relationship or strong linkage with the communities and lead some ideas up to national and international level.

Gabor Vereczi

Regional Technical Advisor on Climate Change Adaptation for the Pacific

UN international Development Program

I think the bottom line is that we need to engage with the traditional villagers and their leaders and study their structures and need to engage also with the government representatives, youth groups and the church groups that are also important in the Pacific.

I think that once you find those leaders and you have them fully engaged in the project then they will be your best advocators.

And I think another mechanism is the sharing of the knowledge management for example is when you're engage with a village for the project, you better take it to another village where they didn't done this before so that can look and learn on what is happening on the ground. I think it's better to have constant flow information. 

Marina Illingworth

AUSAID, Suva Fiji

It is very important to create the ownership value with the communities if they want to own a project then the development partners will help and we can assure them that the project will continue because they do understand things happening to our resources.  Because of that I think that a very important aspect of the bottom up planning is to focus more on the ownership.

Kenrick Lesley

Executive Director of the Caribbean Community of Climate change Centre.

We have to remember that the Climate Change will not impact me, I'm too old. It will be for the children and my grandchildren and therefore we have to educate them as to "what is Climate Change" and "what they can do" because children can influence they parents and the parents can influence the policy makers and therefore we need to get this from bottom up and that will continue in our life. But if you take from the top they will only looking for short times. Children will make it for a long term period because Climate Change will be a long term and that's the way I see the importance for the bottom up planning.

Brenda Koon-Wai-You

Red Cross, Samoa

We do that in Red Cross, sometimes we have to go to the communities and run the awareness programs called Preparedness and Awareness in the Communities. That program includes the Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction because the Climate Change is striking now so we have to let them know as some of them have some good ideas that might help contributing in the issue.

Asaia Taape

PM's office, Tuvalu

Well, in relation to my country Tuvalu where I come from, most of the time the planning is normally done at the community level. We do experience some challenges with their plans because the knowledge at this level is different from ours so we as the government official are trying to help them out with it. Despite this, I can see that it is more effective rather than making the plan at the top and going down.  

Claire Bernard

Planning Institute of Jamaica

We need to have an interface between national level planning and the community level planning because if we adopt the community level planning alone, the action could conflict the national objectives. I think need to have some coincidence between the two then we will recognise the knowledge of the communities as well and the national planning can take that and put it into consideration.  I think we need both to have the best possible solutions.

We just can't do it one way because sometimes the communities have good knowledge and so on but sometimes they need additional knowledge from outside. Community have to go up as the national have to come down and meet somewhere in the middle.

Augustine Poyotte

Ministry of Physical Development and the Environment

St Lucia.

I think it's a case that we need to involve the local public a lot more than what has been done in the past.  I think we need to listen to the people who are going to lose and benefit from the varying changes that will be caused by the Climate Change.  But so far I think it will be good to have a mixture of both, I think it is one of the most effective ways to plan – the bottom up planning