resilience

On the Path to Resilient Development – 2015 & Beyond

Building a sea wall in Kiribati. Lauren Day/World Bank

These are exciting days at the World Bank Group. We are getting ready to receive delegates from our 188 member countries, who will gather in Washington for the WBG-IMF Spring Meetings.

It is an especially important time for the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the disaster risk management team at the World Bank, as we prepare to host – together with the European Union, the Government of Japan, and USAID – the fourth round of the Resilience Dialogue. This round we are focusing on the role disaster and climate resilience can play in the post-2015 development framework.

Disaster and climate risks were not addressed as part of the original framework of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Recent experience has provided countless examples of the devastating impacts of disasters – impacts that go well beyond dollar signs or GDP statistics. It has become evident that disaster and climate risks are impediments to the achievement of poverty reduction and sustainable development goals, and should therefore be integrated in the development framework that will replace the MDGs.

Hazards, vulnerabilities, and exposures… Oh my

Hurricane Sandy satellite image over Caribbean As the East Coast USA deals with Hurricane Sandy, aka “Frankenstorm”, and Hawaii breathes a sigh of relief at a downgraded tsunami, we are again reminded of the immediate and long-term socio-economic destruction of natural disasters. Hurricane Sandy has resulted in school and public transportation closures, flight cancellations, area evacuations, and even modified Presidential campaign schedules. New York Mayor Bloomberg urged residents to cooperate, “if you don't evacuate, you are not only endangering your life, you are also endangering the lives of the first responders who are going in to rescue you. This is a serious and dangerous storm.”¹

Ground zero for natural disasters lies not in the US, however, but in the Asia Pacific Region. Last week, UN ESCAP/UNISDR released the Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2012, ‘Reducing Vulnerability and Exposure to Disasters’. In the year 2011 alone, Asia Pacific represented:

80% (US$ 294/366.1 billion) of the annual global disaster losses
Half of the most costly natural disaster events

Preparing Cities for Climate Change – Initial Lessons from Sandy

NYC subway station damaged by seawater flooding during Hurricane Sandy New York City has been a global leader in proactively planning and preparing for climate change under Mayor Bloomberg and the city’s civic leaders. PlanNYC sets out clear goals and plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30% and to increase the resilience of our communities, natural systems, and infrastructure to climate risks. It already started the process of adapting to climate change, including elevating infrastructure such as wastewater treatment plant, and expanding “green infrastructure” like marshes along the coast to buffer and limit flooding impacts.

But the events triggered by the unprecedented hurricane Sandy haven shown that what has been done is still not sufficient. What can we learn from the disaster? There will be a lot of valuable lessons coming out in the months ahead, as emergency responses are still ongoing and reconstruction are yet to start. Here are three early lessons:

2.3 Million Lives Lost: We Need a Culture of Resilience

Read this post in Español, Français, عربي

Looking at communities across our planet, there is a brutal lack of resilience in our modern lives. Cities have expanded without careful planning into flood- and storm-prone areas, destroying natural storm barriers and often leaving the poor to find shelter in the most vulnerable spots. Droughts, made more frequent by climate change, have taken a toll on crops, creating food shortages.

In the past 30 years, disasters have killed over 2.3 million people, about the population of Houston or all of Namibia.

World Green Building Week 2012: USGBC Focuses on Resilient Buildings as Key to Protecting our Future

Panel from “Cities and Climate Change Adaptation: What We Can Learn About Resilience from Those Living on the Edge", September 2012

On Monday, Sept. 17, a chorus of voices from around the world spoke out in support of “Green Buildings for Great Communities,” the theme of this year’s World Green Building Week, hosted by World Green Building Council. Green building councils from 90 nations organized hundreds of events to educate the public about the health, environmental and economic benefits of sustainable design and construction.

CHF International (Cooperative Housing Foundation), which serves millions of people in low- and moderate-income communities around the world, hosted a panel in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) called “Cities and Climate Change Adaptation: What We Can Learn About Resilience from Those Living on the Edge.” The panel featured Judy Baker, lead economist in the Urban Practice at the World Bank Institute; Brian English, director of program innovation for CHF International; Aram Khachadurian, an international development consultant; Helen Santiago Fink, urban climate change advisor for USAID; and Janice Perlman, an independent scholar, teacher and consultant, who discussed resiliency in the built environment and its role in addressing the plight of the urban poor.

Summerlicious and the Resilience of Cities

Cafe Pleiade Anyone who’s ever been knocked down knows that getting back up can be hard. The 10th Anniversary of Toronto’s ‘Summerlicious’ festival last weekend is a great example of how a city picked itself up after a solid blow.

During Summerlicious (and its seasonal twin, ‘Winterlicious’), restaurants offer two weeks of enticing prix fixe lunches and dinners. The festival, which originally started with 35 high-end restaurants, had more than 180 restaurants participating this year. The restaurant special helped the city recover from the precipitous drop in tourism when Toronto was hit by SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in April 2003.

Supporting People-Smart Regions

Apollo synthetic diamond The Ecological Sequestration Trust has had a busy two months hosting workshops and meetings in India, China, Africa and the UK to discuss how to help these demonstration regions become more resilient and successful.

During this time, I also attended the UrbanTec Conference in Beijing and was struck by how various presentations on ‘smart cities’ emphasized that ICT systems were the key to building more resource efficient and resilient cities.

Building Resilience for the Urban Poor - Let’s Get Moving

In the many slums I have visited in Latin America, Asia and Africa, I am always struck by the resourcefulness and resilience of residents. Slum dwellers face many hardships in their daily life – low incomes, overcrowded living conditions in high risk areas such as flood zones or steep hillsides, and limited access to clean water, sanitation, transport or solid waste services.

These challenges are only made worse by the impacts of climate change and natural hazards. Heavy rains can quickly turn into a disastrous flood as a result of insufficient or ineffective drainage. Such flooding can destroy the limited assets of poor households, halt economic activity, contaminate water supply, lead to disease and displace residents. With the increase in weather extremes, it is anticipated that such events will happen with recurring frequency.

Take the Blue Line to social resilience

Ever wonder what the subway map of Seoul, Korea has to do with social resilience? A group of policy makers, insurance experts and development practitioners wondered the same thing as they mapped risk management strategies and political economy issues onto the subway line maps of different cities. While it seemed absurd, the exercise forced them to think about connections and relationships they may not have considered before. The exercise was part of a retreat recently held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center to advance a study led by the Social Resilience Cluster on Financial Innovations for Social and Climate Resilience (FISCR). The FISCR initiative is assessing the impacts of index insurance on the welfare and risk management strategies of poor households (for more details on the study, see here).

The format and structure of the Bellagio retreat and was co-designed by the Bank team and by faculty and a student from the trans-disciplinary design program of Parsons the New School for Design. The study team’s partnership with Parsons is a key innovation that integrates design thinking throughout the study’s design, implementation, and dissemination in order to increase its impact. Index insurance and social resilience are complex topics that are challenging to communicate. Working with designers from the beginning of the study allows us to view the issues in different ways and consider the ways to engage and empower the target audience throughout the entire process of the study.

The FISCR study is unusual as well in that it examines insurance through a social lens. Index insurance schemes (mainly targeting poor farmers and in a couple of cases herders) have been piloted in a number of countries for more than 10 years now, as a way to help the poor protect their livelihoods. Its proponents speak of great promise: engaging the private sector in the protecting the assets of the poor from climate shocks; enabling the poor to make more productive investments, and encouraging investments in disaster prevention. With these promises, index insurance and other market-based risk financing mechanisms have received a great deal of attention in the global discussion on adaptation financing, including the possibility of developing a climate risk insurance facility (see related Cancun agreement).

Maya Nut Could Boost Resilience to Climate Change

DM2009 Winner, Masagni, adopted the Maya Nut Institute's "Healthy Kids, Health Forests Maya Nut School Lunch Program" in Nicaragua's Miskito indigenous communities. For more information on this DM project, click here.

This article was originally published on http://ourworld.unu.edu/, for the original blog post, click here. The Our World 2.0 web magazine shares the ideas and actions of citizens around the world who are transforming our lives for the better.

Photo by Our World 2.0

Global climate models indicate that Central America will experience temperature rise and increasingly dry conditions over the next decades. Precipitation will decrease, causing severe water stress and more frequent and intense drought periods. Pressure on natural resources will grow, as a result of both demographic pressures and climate change, while degradation of ecosystems will further exacerbate water and food scarcity, worsening the living conditions of vulnerable people and communities.

Pakistan, A Bittersweet Homecoming

Speaking with colleague Ahsan Tehsin, who worked on the Bank's damage and needs assessment for Pakistan.

I have always had a desire to work in a developing country and have felt a pull towards Pakistan due to my heritage. So after two exciting years in Washington DC, I came across an opportunity to work in the Islamabad office; I went for it.

Within days of accepting the position -to work for the Multi-Donor Trust Fund supporting the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally-Administered Tribal Areas and Balochistan regions- I was in Islamabad. I had lived in the country for years when I was younger. With family and my fluency in Urdu, this was a homecoming of sorts, but a bittersweet one.

Each day on my way to work I am welcomed by the many checkpoints placed every few kilometers with law enforcement inspecting every vehicle with caution and professionalism (two qualities I once thought they were incapable of possessing!). I encounter at least seven checkpoints. The security situation has deteriorated to such an extent that these barriers to the flow of traffic - and in the mornings, to the flow of thought – bring calm to an otherwise chaotic world.

Development Marketplace seeks volunteers to help assess innovative climate change ideas

Development Marketplace (DM) is a competitive grants program administered by the World Bank that identifies and funds innovative, early-stage projects that deliver results and have a high potential for scale-up.

This year's global competition on Climate Adaptation (DM 2009) focuses on (i) Resilience of Indigenous People's Communities to Climate Risks; (ii) Climate Risk Management with Multiple Benefits; and (iii) Climate Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management.

For every annual DM global competition, over 200 assessors (including some World Bank staff) volunteer to review proposals and select finalists. We are seeking development professionals with expertise in climate change adaptation to help identify the 100 finalists. Assessors commit to volunteer approximately 5-7 hours between June 4-10, 2009 to review 30-40 proposals and submit online the ranking of their top eight most innovative proposals.

The next urban crisis: poverty and climate change

With Maria Blair, Associate Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation

The next urban crisis: poverty and climate change

We read Nicholas Stern’s blog post, “Low-Carbon Growth: The Only Sustainable Way to Overcome World Poverty,” with appreciation and enthusiasm. It is an insightful and important essay, illuminating the bedrock recognition on which effective 21st century development efforts must build: global climate change and poverty are inextricably interconnected. The best way to break one is to bend the other.

resilience

You are here

RESOURCES FOR