Integrated climate change adaptation: towards an emancipatory community forestry-based approach

In recent years, the notion of 'integrated adaptation' has emerged in international climate change discourse. This approach emphasises the need to analyse vulnerability across sectors and to develop adaptation interventions that create positive cross-sectoral impacts. This paper suggests that community forestry, as an already-embedded form of commoning, could be a useful entry point for implementing integrated adaptation. It presents a community forestry-based climate change adaptation (CF-CCA) framework, as conceived and implemented in Nepal’s Terai. It then evaluates the framework – through the lens of political ecology – and its approach to community level data collection, building linkages with local government, and the tenability of 'scaling up' the framework in its current form. We conclude by asserting that the CF-CCA framework is a promising tool for integrated adaptation that must be further 'politicised' in order to address dynamic issues of power and inequality and provide emancipatory change