Why Is It So Hard to Engage Local Communities in Climate Vulnerability Assessments?

What Are Participatory Climate Vulnerability Assessments, and Why Do They Matter?

Climate change is not affecting everyone equally. The communities most exposed and vulnerable to climate impacts are often the ones with the least voice in the decisions that shape their future. Closing that gap is at the heart of locally led adaptation (LLA), also referred to as community-based adaptation (CBA): an approach that places communities at the centre of climate adaptation decision making. Rather than prescribing solutions from the outside, LLA aims to strengthen communities' agency in identifying their own priorities and designing their own solutions.

A participatory climate vulnerability assessment (PCVA) is the essential first step in this process. It is a facilitated process that combines community knowledge with scientific climate data to map current and future climate risks, and to understand how those risks affect distinct gender and social groups within a community differently.

Getting this right matters. A poorly conducted PCVA (rushed, superficial, or failing to capture the diverse perspectives) leads to poorly designed adaptation plans. Resources go to the wrong priorities. Vulnerable groups are left out. Opportunities to build genuine resilience are missed.

"This project allowed the communities to have an input, instead of assuming what they want or what they are going through; the communities are speaking for themselves, instead of going with preconceived ideas of what is needed."

CBA SCALE+ project partner

Despite more than 20 years of practice, scaling LLA meaningfully remains elusive. Many assessments that call themselves participatory are still extractive in practice. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed in its 2022 Sixth Assessment Report that LLA can successfully enhance adaptive capacity. Yet the persistent challenge is implementing it at a scale that meaningfully reflects the social diversity of communities and the urgency of the crisis.

A new report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development and CARE offers a field-tested account of what keeps going wrong and what practitioners can do about it. It draws on PCVAs conducted in nearly 100 communities across Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe between 2024 and 2025, as part of the CBA SCALE+ project. While many of the challenges identified have already been documented, they persist today. Here’s why.

Why Are Participatory Climate Vulnerability Assessments Harder Than They Look?

We know communities need to lead efforts to strengthen their resilience to climate change impacts. But doing this well (respectfully, rigorously, and at scale) is far harder than it looks. Three challenges in particular resonate from the CBA SCALE+ experience.

Adapting and Responding to Overlapping Crises

In early 2024, Zambia declared a state of national emergency. Zimbabwe followed weeks later. A prolonged drought driven by El Niño had been devastating harvests since mid-2023. Cereal yields in Zambia fell 43% below the 5-year average. In Zimbabwe, the figure was 50%. Communities across the project area were hungry, water-scarce, and under acute stress.

In this context, conducting a PCVA didn’t seem like a priority to the communities and local governments, who were understandably focused on food relief, not multi-decade planning. Some partner organizations, with histories of humanitarian work in the same areas, were expected to provide emergency assistance that the project was not designed to deliver. When flexible emergency funding was not available, trust began to erode. Communities that had committed to engaging with the process started to pull back.

This kind of polycrisis context, when climate, economic, and political crises overlap and reinforce each other, is increasingly the normal operating environment for climate adaptation practitioners.

This means that flexible funding mechanisms need to be built into project design from the start, not scrambled for after a crisis hits. Equally critical is honest expectation management. Communities in survival mode cannot meaningfully engage with 30-year climate projections unless their immediate reality is first acknowledged. The project teams that rebuilt trust most effectively were those that adapted their engagement (through shorter sessions, more flexibility, transparent communication about delays) while finding ways to address urgent needs alongside longer-term work.

Bridging Community Knowledge and Climate Science

Even without a drought emergency, one of the hardest tasks in any PCVA is integrating what communities know from lived experience with what climate science tells us about future risks.

Communities hold rich knowledge of their local environments, built over generations: how rainfall has shifted over decades, which crops no longer perform as they once did, and where seasonal flooding has become more frequent. While irreplaceable, this knowledge is, by definition, rooted in observed experience. Climate projections, on the other hand, describe what climate variables such as temperature and rainfall may look like in 2040 or 2060; a future no one has yet lived through.

The CBA SCALE+ team encountered four recurring barriers to bridging this gap.

• The first is framing. Framing the PCVA primarily as a participatory exercise may have unintentionally signalled that scientific climate projections were optional, rather than central to the analysis.
• The second is capacity. Translating technical climate projections into accessible, locally meaningful messages requires both scientific fluency and skilled facilitation. That combination is rare, and the report found that some project teams lacked the confidence to engage communities meaningfully with future climate data.
• The third is present bias: the human tendency to prioritize immediate concerns over long-term risks. This is particularly true for communities already under stress: Getting people to think about 2050 when 2024 is already a crisis requires deliberate, skilled facilitation.
• The fourth is trust in the messenger. In some communities, scientific information was received with skepticism, particularly when it came from the government. The credibility of the person delivering the information shaped whether communities were willing to engage with it.

What worked? A gradual, trust-based approach. Seasonal weather forecasts are shorter-term predictions that communities can connect to immediate decisions about planting and livestock. Teams that started with those forecasts found that when they proved accurate, communities became more open to longer-term projections.

"Building trust is slow. Last year, the traditional community predictions and the scientific predictions matched, so the communities were more willing to listen to the scientific knowledge."

CBA SCALE+ project partner

Building community confidence in climate science requires time, repeated interactions, trusted local messengers, and visual tools that make abstract data tangible.

Meaningfully Engaging Local Governments

For LLA actions to move from community plans into funded, implemented reality, local governments need to be genuine partners, not just formal signatories or occasional attendees.

The CBA SCALE+ experience showed that meaningfully engaging local governments is essential, but challenging. Across the three countries, teams encountered gaps in local officials' technical capacity on climate adaptation, competing pressures from drought emergencies, and in some cases, pre-existing tensions between civil society organizations and government actors that affected collaboration.

At the same time, the project's strongest outcomes came precisely where local governments were most engaged. In Mozambique, early and sustained collaboration with district-level councils meant that PCVA results fed directly into the local adaptation plans of two districts. In Zimbabwe, regular updates to government extension workers through existing communication channels helped keep the process connected to formal planning systems.

Local government involvement must begin at the outset of a PCVA, not at the validation stage. Officials brought in early become advocates for the process and champions for its results within formal systems. Those invited only at the end remain, at best, passive endorsers.

The Knowledge Is Already There: A Call to Do This Better

In Zimbabwe, project teams documented how some communities had already adapted their cropping patterns and livestock types to changing climate conditions; responses developed through observation and necessity, without external support. They identified community-led initiatives that deserved to be scaled up: drought-tolerant seed multiplication programs, locally enforced wetland protection rules, and diversified livelihood strategies built around shifting seasonal patterns.

In Zambia, the PCVA process revealed that 4 of the 12 focus communities relied primarily on legal mining rather than agriculture—a fact that fundamentally changed what climate adaptation needed to look like for those communities and that no existing secondary data had captured.

These findings were only possible because the process was genuinely participatory: communities were given space to speak for themselves, rather than having their realities assumed in advance. They also demonstrate the value of PCVAs in generating nuanced, context-specific information. Such insights are critical for identifying adaptation measures that build on existing strengths while addressing priority needs.

The challenge, then, is building the systems (the funding structures, the facilitation capacity, the inter-institutional trust, the policy frameworks) that allow existing community knowledge to surface, be taken seriously, and be acted upon.

That requires NGOs to resist the temptation to arrive with pre-packaged solutions. It requires funders to accept that genuine participation takes time and cannot be compressed into a short project cycle. It requires local governments to show up as partners in collective learning, not as authorities dispensing directives.

The lessons from this report have been documented before. The challenges persist because the structural conditions that generate them (tight timelines, inflexible funding, insufficient investment in local capacity) have not changed significantly.

Closing that gap is not just good practice. For the nearly 100 communities in Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe that took part in this process, and the many millions more living on the frontlines of climate change, it is a matter of urgency.
 

The quotes in this article come from partners who wished to stay anonymous. All photos are from Margret Ngonga, CARE Zambia.

The Community-based Adaptation: Scaling-up Community Action for Livelihoods and Ecosystems (CBA SCALE+) project is implemented by a consortium led by CARE Deutschland along with IUCN, FANRPAN, IISD and local partners, with financial support from The International Climate Initiative.