Month: February 2018

The Handbook for Local Government Leaders: How to Make Cities More Resilient was launched at the World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The Handbook is a contribution of the Making Cities Resilient Campaign to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. The Handbook, which was a collaboration between UNISDR, CUDRR+R and UPAG provides tools, resources, and case studies for local governments that are part of the Making Cities Resilient Campaign to reduce disaster risk and increase their resilience. Over 4000 cities have joined the Campaign since its launch in 2010.

For more information on the Making Cities Resilient Campaign and its tools, please visit:https://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/

To download the book free:

https://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/assets/documents/guidelines/Handbook%20for%20local%20government%20leaders%20[2017%20Edition].pdf

 

CUDRR+R’s Ebru Gencer and Wesley Rhodes have just published a new article titled “Toward Climate Resilient Development in the USA: From Federal to Local Level Initiatives and Practices since the 2000s,” as part of the publication Urban Disaster Resilience and Security (Springer 2017). You can access the document at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-68606-6_4

The article explores the evolving concept of disaster risk management and climate resilience building in the United States of America (USA) within the last two decades. The chapter starts by examining federal-level actions towards disaster risk management and climate adaptation and resilience and then delves into local-level actions through the case studies of Nashville, Tennessee, and Hoboken, New Jersey. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the future of climate resilience in the USA. The chapter illustrates that the availability of multiple layers of government has been an effective safety guard against any individual layer’s potential unwillingness to undertake protective risk management or climate resilience building. At state and regional levels, where political will was lacking, federal-level support, particularly in the Obama era, and the initiatives of private foundations have been very valuable. Nowhere, though, have climate resilience building actions in the USA been proven more effective than at the city administrative level. As everywhere else, local-level governments in the USA are at the forefront of disasters and the impacts of climate change and try to take the initiatives of preparing their cities for protection.

On January 26, 2018, CUDRR+R’s Ebru Gencer and Simone Buechler attended the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum Workshop on Prevention.

Gencer and Buechler were among the experts who discussed the different aspects of prevention and how they relate to the overarching goals of the United Nations, as a kick-off to SSRC’s research project on Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Prevention.

For more on SSRC and their activities, please see:

https://www.ssrc.org/