Rural villages in Cambodia often have limited infrastructure and resources to respond to climate change and disaster. HAC supports local capacity building in this space, the teachings aim to promote an outcome of sustainable and safe living.

          

In order to achieve an age-inclusive and disaster-resilient community, HAC has supported villages in establishing Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)/Climate Change (CCA) sub-committees to assist OPA members in developing a Community-Based Disaster Risk Management Plan (CBDRMP) and to carry out related-activities within this framework.

HAC is working with the most vulnerable districts in terms of natural disaster and aims to find local solutions to help community members. During a flood, residents face health problems caused by unclean drinking water and economic problems from the loss of shelter, livestock and harvests. The flood blocks roads, preventing delivery of fresh food and drinking water. HAC has also provided climate change-resilient agriculture training to the DRR/CCA sub-committee members and ‘Master Trainers’. Master Trainers are tasked with the job of sharing information on resilient climate change agriculture techniques to other villagers.

HAC is confident that OPA’s will maintain a strong community, well equipped to cope with the impacts of climate change and natural disasters. The most important HAC focus is to reduce the impact of climate change and natural disasters on people’s livelihoods. HAC and OPA’s coordinate age-inclusive, disaster resilient communities to reduce underlying vulnerabilities to climate related hazards through implementing disaster risk reduction activities, with specific focus on improving disaster preparedness and response, and strengthening resilient livelihoods.

Older People in the villages have the opportunity to be direct facilitators of many project activities focusing on DRR/CCA-interventions, micro-credit schemes, climate adaptive resilient farming systems and improved water infrastructure. Leadership and basic knowledge of DRR/CCA training are provided to the OPA management committee including the sub-committee members.

The project team and master trainers are provided vegetable seeds and tools, ongoing coaching for beneficiaries to build capacity and assistance on implementing activities. Master trainers and older farmers are identified and selected among OPA members to receive resilient agriculture training from DRR/CCA sub-committee members. The training focuses on building building capacity and knowledge around sustainable, resilient crops.