The regional Urban Community Resilience Hub (UCRH) intends to coordinate and connect urban work across the Asia Pacific (AP) region, enhancing knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer exchange within and beyond RCRC networks and platforms, and operationalize the existing urban learning with a strong orientation toward partnerships and innovation for current and future initiatives.
This Hub provides a space where urban actors can:
Resources
Share knowledge and experience in urban programming. The resource section provides a variety of reports, toolkits, guidelines, and case studies permanently growing.
Community Groups
Connect with other urban practitioners. Through the community groups, you can connect to discuss challenges and opportunities in specific areas of urban work.
Funding Opportunities
Find opportunities for funding. The section 'funding opportunities' is frequently updated with new options to fund urban resilience-focused projects.
Calendar
Keep up to date with the urban agenda. In the calendar section, you can find the main upcoming events, training, and webinars in urban community resilience.
News
Building resilience in Coastal Urban communities
Urbanization is bringing many new challenges and opportunities, for example, natural hazards pose major risks to critical infrastructure and large population; with the demand of energy in these cities, greenhouse gas emissions are increasing; there are more frequent and intense extreme weather events and continuing sea level rise. With a blending of these issues, communities in urban areas are increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards and disasters.
Explore the Urban Community Resilience Toolkits
The urban community resilience tool box includes three connected and complementary toolkits to help urban communities identify their resilience priorities and design sustainable and scalable solutions together with a diverse set of partners: City-wide Resilience Assessment, Building Coalitions for Urban Resilience, and Designing Solutions for Urban Community Resilience. These toolkits are developed and tested with the Red Cross National Societies of Indonesia, Vanuatu, and Myanmar with funding support from the USAID under the Coastal Cities Resilience program.
Motivation
Urbanisation has become a driving force of development with the power to change and improve lives, but at the same time urban centres have become hotspots of risks for crises. These challenges are particularly acute in the Asia Pacific region, where around 60% of the world population live, more than 40% of them live in urban areas, and holds 7 out of the 10 most populated cities in the world. Moreover, this is the most affected region by disasters in the world, and the effects of climate change and conflicts, challenge everyday even more the capacity of cities to cope with extreme events and crises.
In this context the Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) Movement has worked consistently to keep up with the challenge. Through its network of national societies and their chapters it is increasing efforts in preparedness and contingency planning, as well as, increasing an active presence in urban settings to respond to disasters and crisis including the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake & Tsunami and the 2015 Nepal Earthquake (Kathmandu Valley), among many others programming initiative.
In order to make the most out of the growing experience in urban resilience, Disaster Risk Reduction and response in the AP region the UCRH is a new opportunity for sharing knowledge and interconnect among humanitarian actors in the region in order to continue working to amplify the voice of vulnerable people for the development of more resilient communities in complex urban areas.
- Strengthen the connections among urban resilience actors in AP region to promote innovative approaches to tackle urban resilience challenges.
- Promote knowledge sharing and evidence-based programming within the RCRC movement and the wider humanitarian community.
- Improve organizational resilience through a continuous process of learning and adaptation to changing contexts.
Background
Develop knowledge and skills base within the RCRC Movement and the wider humanitarian community.
Relevance
As one of the key steps in the Asia Pacific Road Map for Urban Resilience and in line with the Strategy for Urban Resilience, this initiative contributes to regional and global initiatives aligning its purpose to the sustainable development goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, will contribute to the Goal and Targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk reduction and its Four Priorities for Action, and supports the New Urban Agenda commitment to strengthen resilience in cities to reduce the risk and the impact of disasters.
Objectives
-
Establish strong connections for urban resilience through city-wide coalitions, shared commitments with city emergency management systems, alignment with local, national, regional and global levels, and advocacy for enhanced community resilience.
-
Develop knowledge and skills base through capacity building for urban resilience based on evidence and shared learning with Red Cross Red Crescent and wider network of partners.
-
Strengthen organizational resilience by adapting urban resilience tools and approaches, facilitate long-term planning and funding, adapt urban volunteer management and support contingency planning so Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies can continue to serve urban populations after disasters.