For a picture of how Pablo's game works, here's some coverage that OneWorld filmed at last year's CDKN Action Lab in Oxford.

Knowledge is power in this game of chance (called life)

Latest blog from CBA6 by Suzanne Fisher Murray, featuring an interview with Pablo Suarez from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

In the closing session, Saleemul Huq highlights some of the next steps from the conference: 

Controversial question asked by Terry Cannon from IDS to Richard Bossi (FHI 360) and Patrick Papania (FHI 360). The questions: are they qualified to talk about the subject they are talking about, why the two of them are on the same panel and about the corporate support for the organisation.

Answer: they aren't climate adaptation experts, but they are experts in communications strategy. They suggested the rest should be discussed later so that the other panelists had time to answer questions.

Learn some blogging tips via live tweets from the blog session and exercise run by Suzanne Fisher Murray from IIED.
The session has been storified by Lucia Nass

Maurine Kasuvu Ambani from CARE is presenting on Participatory scenario planning. Climate information is exchanged during workshops -
both local knowledge and and scientific forecasting information is shared. This allows villagers to meet with meteorologists and for them to better understand the needs of the communities. And it allows communities to make informed decisions on what crops to grow.

Stories & Videos from CBA6 Conference - 16-22 April 2012
Guest blog by CARE team

Just watched a video on a participatory video workshop carried out by Kat Gawlik in the Soloman Islands.The workshop covered filming and planning a story by using a storyboard. The video shows a government official saying (after watching the video) that they will show the situation of the island to the government: "the government needs to listen to the needs of the people." A representative was later flown over to the UN Forum after seeing the video on Youtube.

Patrick Papania from FHI 360 presented on taking a systems approach to scaling up community preparedness and responses to climatic shocks (called SCALE). The project got stakeholders together to map out common goals, created a communications unit - who kept them moving on their commitments.

In Kenya, people weren't adopting the fodder shrubs. They mapped out the system, formed an advisory group and helped them decide which groups to meet with: including other ministries. The group self-facilitated. Once they decided their goals they provided technical assistance to them:
-institutional capacity building
-private sector partnership
-media awards
-knowledge management
At the end, they did a system analysis and showed linkages between groups had increased.

Rick Bossi from FHI 360  holds up a Coke can and asks what it is? It's a brand that we all know. Why does Coke do so much advertising? What is Coke selling? Happiness. It works because they do good market research. Do we do that, he asks the climate change adaptation practitioners?

Bossi notes that even Coca Cola keeps spending on communication, after 120 years. $11 billion on PR, comms, marketing in 2 years.

Raising awareness does not create action. He asks if anyone smokes in the room. Someone says, yes, they are aware of the dangers, but they keep smoking.

Do we test our work? Rick Bossi suggests that we could hire professional communicators to do the work. Communicators do think about their audiences and think about them as consumers.
We have to recognise that marketing is a science, not just an art. We need to do it continually and invest in it, like Coca Cola does.

Participants explore some of the limits and barriers to adaptation in an 'out of the box' session led by Bettina Koelle of Indigo Development and Change. Stay tuned for a video interview with Bettina later today.

Hannah Reid of IIED discusses two of the key trends in community-based adaptation.

Interesting presentation from Nguyen Tri Thanh of Asia Foundation. Vietnam has 544,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and they are an important part of the country's economy. Yet most disaster risk reduction plans fail to include SMEs, he says. Of the losses caused by natural disasters, 85% of SMEs were hit by seasons storms, 45% by floods and 12% by cyclones. 52% had their buildings or infrastructure damaged. And there is a low level of co-operation in developing disaster reduction plans, despite many businesses suffering severe losses.

If you missed the live webcast last night, be sure to catch up on this interview with Pablo Suarez - he gives a great overview of community-based adaptation and discusses his research on the potential of participatory games as an effective means of communication.

And another!

$100 million of climate smart smallholder agriculture for Vietnam
Guest blog by Jeffrey A. Brez, International Fund for Agricultural Development

Many of you have been busy blogging overnight. Brilliant!

Exciting new work towards integration of Community Based and Ecosystems Based Adaptation Approaches
Guest blog by Lucia Nass

Climate change has a women face -A salty pathway ahead
Guest blog by Nasir Aziz from Action Aid, Pakistan

There's an 'out of the box' blog workshop at 11 today for anyone who now feels inspired!

Tamara Plush of Care International discusses the opportunities and challenges present when using participatory video with local communities.

Terry Cannon from IDS discussed rural livelihood diversification and adaptation to climate change in his presentation. He said practitioners need to look at the different kinds of people who make up a rural community. To do this you could look at the issue of land tenure within rural communities - what will sharecroppers, tenant farmers or day labourers do to adapt to climate change? What will the rich farmer or the lanlord do?

He also suggested looking at the rural non-farm economy as many people (around 30-40%) do non-farm activities as well. "To carry on as usual is likely to perpetuate poverty", says Cannon. Not everyone will be able to carry on farming due to the impacts of climate change. Non-farming actvities are less climate dependent and so will need to be adopted in certain contexts. 

Arame Tall emphasises that 'we are not saving local communities - they are already doing a lot'. Many delegates here feel that national and international policy makers haven't yet fully accept this proposition and that prevailing approaches are still overly prescriptive. But there is hope that CBA can change this.

Rolf Herno of Care Denmark reflects on his experience of CBA6, and discusses how he will apply the lessons he's learnt.

Reflections from the 6th International Conference on Community Based Adaptation, Hanoi, Vietnam
Guest blog by Prabhakar SVRK

Do you have a CBA6 blog that you would like to share? If so, please send them to Suzanne Fisher, Online content manager at IIED: suzanne.fisher@iied.org

Atiq Rahman, of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), discusses his expectations of CBA6 and considers the evolution and direction of community-based adaptation.

Pablo Suarez of the Red Cross shows participants how games can be used to communicate important concepts to local communities, policy makers and funders.

In Jumla, the ‘Mukhiya’ system of local governance dominates. Communal work is strong but their understanding of climate change adaptation is likely not to be strong. Key learnings: local institutions are key for learning and innovation and mainstreaming adaptation to climate change. Local institutions shape the local responses to climate change.

Outside the plenary hall, Harjeet Singh of ActionAid emphasises that interactions with local communities should be a conversation rather than a prescriptive process. He goes on to discuss some of the problems with current attitudes towards community-based adaptation.

Erik Keus pilot province under the NTP-RRC in Ben Tre, Vietnam just finished his presentation. The project is carrying out a variety of adaptation activities to deal with saline intrusion. They have built a water treatment plant, built drainage canals from coconut farms, rainwater tanks and mangrove planting. One takeway: there could be increased co-operation and information exchange between different sectors.

Great photo from Paul Mitchell, of Save the Children, showing participants learning games to help children understand climate change yesterday. You can follow Paul on twitter @ptmitchell

Key takeaways from the second presentation by Tuan Tranh, NTP-RCC Vietnam. Build trust among stakeholders and focus on the right local institutions at the right level to mainstream community-based climate change adaptation activities.

The 3rd presentation was from Naima Oumaoussa from Ministry of Environment, Morocco. The Ministry and partners plan on replicating successful projects - they currently have 8 pilot projects in different geographical contexts in the country.  

Top tips for pitching climate change adaptation stories to the media

You have a great project and a pressing problem - but the media's not interested. Why? You're speaking the wrong language and the editor can't hear you. When climate change practitioners pitch stories to the media they need to pretend they're living in a foreign country and speak a different language, the language of stories.

Read the full blog

Top tips on pitching a story on climate change from Mike Shanahan:

Do you have questions on community-based adaptation that you would like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page, or #cba6 on twitter, to share them with us and we'll get them answered by top experts here in Hanoi. We'll also be discussing the most interesting issues live during the webcast this evening, starting at 6pm local time (12 noon in London; 7am in New York). Tune in!

Mike Shanahan, Press Officer at IIED, leads a fascinating session on how to get climate change stories into the mainstream media. A successful community-based adaptation initiative is a rare opportunity for a feel-good story on climate change - but how best to pitch it to a journalist? Check the IIED youtube channel later today to hear more of Mike's thoughts on shifting stories from the climate change front lines to the newspaper front page.

Watch Margareta Wahlstrom's opening address to CBA6 below, and then tune in to the live show this evening (starts 6pm in Hanoi; 12 noon in London; 7am in New York) to see our follow-up interview.

Vietnam: Building one village’s resilience to climate change all starts with a cave

Alan Brouder, Team Manager of Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction at Oxfam GB, discusses some of the lessons learnt from existing adaptation initiatives and explores the wider trends and expectations for CBA in the future.

John Nielsen, Ambassador of Denmark to Vietnam and Laos, delivered his opening address to the conference this morning. Watch it here:

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, opted to send a low-carbon video message to the CBA6 conference. You can watch it here:

Watch Dr Saleemul Huq's opening keynote address delivered to CBA6 this morning:

Arame Tall tells the conference that information from climate scientists has not always reached communities on the ground - and vice versa. Obstacles include challenges of trust, language, clarity and access, but the gap can be bridged with the right facilitation she says. The right kind of communication is important; for example, local communities need alerts, not probabilities, from scientists. Follow #CBA6 on twitter for live-tweets from the conference.

Sherpard Zvgizda of ZERO used his presentation to emphasise the importance of low-cost communication methods in Africa. Offline tools implemented in local languages, such as newsletters and posters, DVDs, theatre, radio and TV, have all helped communities learn about climate adaptation says Zvigadza. Find out more from ZERO's website.

Harjeet Singh of ActionAid tells the conference that NGOs too often forget that communication with local communities should be a conversation: if action and reflection takes place in a cyclical manner, communication can lead to real empowerment.

Christiana Figureres, Exec. Secretary of the UNFCCC, addresses the conference via video link.  

Dr Saleemul Huq, a Senior Research fellow at IIED, talks about how community-based adaptation has progressed since the first conference held in Bangladesh and what his hopes are for the CBA6 conference in Vietnam.

What do HIV/AIDS and Climate Change have in common?

How to connect with the CBA community

Mangroves break waves and help the people of Dai Hop Commune break even.

A tale of typhoons, trees and tiny creatures that stood between a community and climate resilience.

Corinne Schoch, climate change researcher at IIED, welcomes you all to the upcoming CBA6 conference in this audio clip.