Coalition-building in Coastal Cities
Description
The Global Disaster Preparedness Center (GDPC) in collaboration with the IFRC and the American Red Cross has received an award from USAID/OFDA to design and test a set of tools and services to assist Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) National Societies and their partners to create effective city coalitions on community resilience, targeting climate-smart resilience and coastal risk reduction in particular. The RCRC National Societies will use it’s convening power to engage relevant partner organizations in lasting coalitions to focus city-wide expertise, capabilities, and resources on priority risks facing vulnerable communities in the city. The coalitions will complement existing urban governance processes led by local government and draw wider support from the business community, universities, civil society organizations, and other stakeholders into city-wide civic engagement on community resilience.
Focus on climate change adaptation & coastal resilience
The project focuses specifically on addressing climate change adaptation and resilience needs in coastal cities. Communities worldwide have greater opportunities for growth and connectedness than ever before; yet the number of people exposed to hazards, shocks, and stresses is rapidly increasing, especially in coastal cities as a result of sea-level rise, changing storm patterns, and related risks. This is leading to increased fragility and vulnerability. To strengthen their resilience in the face of climate change, cities need enhanced civic engagement that draws on the strength and diversity of urban communities and that complements formal governance structures by engaging a wider set of stakeholders to focus on resilience at the community and household level.
By focusing on priority risks, the coalition can target those risk and threats of greatest concern. With the support of diverse coalition members, the coalitions can identify climate-smart solutions and interventions to address the priority risks and bundle the solutions into local campaigns to engage local communities and link the efforts of individuals, households, businesses, community and local organizations, and local governments. The project will draw in particular on support from the RCRC Climate Centre and The Nature Conservancy to strengthen the adaptation and coastal resilience outcomes of the project.
The Nature Conservancy and GDPC Partnership
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Global Disaster Preparedness Center (GDPC) have formed a unique and innovative partnership blending TNC’s experience in science-based ecosystem conservation and restoration, with the Red Cross’s experience in community mobilization, awareness-raising, and education. The goal of this partnership is to identify and advance collaborative activities that jointly build ecological and social solutions to increase the resilience of communities from natural disasters and climate impacts.
The Nature Conservancy has joined efforts with GDPC in the Coastal Cities project to help identify ways that nature can be part of building social-ecological community resilience before, during, and after natural disasters. As the project conducts workshops with communities and key stakeholders to discover different aspects of social-ecological resilience, through coalition building, TNC will contribute to the importance of nature conservation and geospatial technology to the dialogues.
The Coastal Resilience approach and tools will provide city-specific ecosystem data that can assist and guide city level planners and community members to make informed decisions for appropriate nature-based adaptation solutions, or natural infrastructure, as a critical component of disaster risk reduction. Find out more here.
Locations
The project is being piloted in one city of Vanuatu (Luganville), one city of Myanmar (Mawlamyine), and two cities of Indonesia (Semarang and Ternate).
One Billion Coalition for Resilience (1BC)
Central to the One Billion Coalition is the conviction that individuals have the capability to take a variety of resilience actions within their immediate surroundings and social networks. They can also work together to undertake resilience actions within the organizations and communities to which they are directly connected. Further, they can participate in wider forms of civic engagement to coordinate and/or advocate for change in wider social and governance systems to improve resilience. Resilience gains can be made through either individual or collective action, but fuller states of resilience require a combination of the two.
This project provides a significant opportunity to develop and test local coalition-building and campaign approaches for collective action and the opportunity to marry these approaches to individual action. By focusing on cities, the RCRC and other 1BC partners will gain further experience working in cities and through urban governance processes and learn valuable lessons for wider application globally with 1BC.
The project will also be able to draw on the global resources being developed for 1BC, including the public engagement, business continuity, CSO partnership, advocacy, and operations platforms. Those platforms are described in more detail on the 1BC website.
Toolkits
Explore the Urban Resilience Toolkit
