CEDRA Follow up Workshop
It is not possible for any one agency to address all the issues raised in the course of your
CEDRA Assessment. So it is important to find ways of sharing your learning with others
and encouraging other stakeholders to take action on some of the impacts identified.
Tearfund recommends that you hold a follow-up workshop to share your CEDRA findings
and Action Plan recommendations – ideally over two to four days. Invite a range of
stakeholders: workshops are an excellent opportunity to share information gathered and
also to receive support for decision-making and problem-solving early on. Our experience
is that it works well if you invite the original participants to the whole workshop and invite
the external stakeholders and key community representatives to the last day.
You will already have been sharing your findings with the network of other agencies
implementing CEDRA in your country or region through each of the previous Steps. This
workshop will help you build on these relationships and encourage knowledge-sharing.
It is useful to do the following in a workshop with a range of stakeholders present:

Consider different timeframes for the climatic and environmental impacts you have
identified. Consider a range of timeframes, eg short-term (less than five years),
medium-term (five to 25 years), long-term (more than 25 years).

The follow-up workshop is also a good time to review the different adaptation options
you have selected and consider how well they work together. Are they compatible or
at odds with each other? You should also think through whether they are compatible
with the ‘do no harm’ principle – ensuring that your adaptation options will cause no
further damage to the environment and will be environmentally sustainable.
Typical content for a follow-up workshop is shown below, although you should adapt this
to suit your context:
Days 1 and 2 Agencies implementing CEDRA are all invited to come together to share
their findings and recommendations. Participants are encouraged to share details of the
process they went through, the community and other stakeholders consulted, and other
sources of information they consulted to complete their assessment. Participants are
encouraged to share their conclusions on which climatic and environmental impacts are
most significant and how they ranked them in order of priority. They should also share
with everyone which adaptation options they identified as possible or necessary.
Agencies should then share their Action Plans and indicate which activities they have
chosen to carry out and which ones they are hoping to encourage others to act on. It is
helpful to have a facilitator who keeps a record of all agencies’ proposed actions and
identifies how many of the likely impacts participating agencies will be responding to and
how many are reliant on action by external stakeholders. It is common for networks of
agencies to draw up a shared Action Plan showing activities that they will support each
other in and activities that they want to bring to the attention of external stakeholders for
action.
Day 2 Organisations implementing CEDRA usually find it very useful to include one or
more days visiting each others’ communities and projects to look at impacts and
communities’ responses to them. It is also a good opportunity to share learning on good
practice and pilot adaptation projects.
Day 3 of the workshop is all about sharing your findings with others and encouraging
them to take some of the necessary actions in response to climate and environmental
change. However, it is important to recognise that all stakeholders have valuable
knowledge and experience – and that the workshop therefore should have two-way
communication. You should make it clear that you want stakeholders to comment on your
findings and proposed actions, so you can learn from them so your CEDRA Assessment
and Action Plan are as strong as possible.
It is important to recognise that the stakeholders you have invited will all have very
different levels of knowledge of climate and environmental change. They will also have
different priorities and opinions on which poverty issues are most pressing at the national
or local level.
You will need a skilled facilitator present, someone who is seen as ‘neutral’ by all
stakeholders. The facilitator should be someone who has the skills to ensure that
everyone has a voice and feels listened to and consulted, including any community
members who may not be feeling confident in this environment.
During this follow-up workshop, take time to explain the CEDRA process: why you did it,
how you did it, who contributed and what you found out at each stage. You can then
explain all the different potential adaptation options that you identified and go through
your proposed Action Plan. You should emphasise that you are not trying to tell others
what their priorities should be. Instead, you are just sharing your findings in the hope that
they are useful to as many people as possible and because you want their input on how
to improve your own work. You should invite participants to comment at any time.
It is helpful to have a blank Action Plan template to hand that your facilitator can
complete as different stakeholders commit to carrying out actions to strengthen their own
work or new activities. Note these down even if at this stage they commit only to
considering whether or not to do something.