Project

Making Cities Resilient 2030: Urban Resilience Training Series in China

2019 – 2024
China
What we are doing
Each part of the world faces specific vulnerabilities to climate change and has different opportunities to mitigate the effects and build resilience. As climate change gets more obvious, extreme weather and disasters are posing big threats on citizens’ well-being and national stability. China covers 7% of the world’s landmass but suffers one-third of all recorded earthquakes. And due to its complex and diverse climate patterns, the country is also annually affected by floods, forest fires, landslides and typhoons. To enhance urban resilience and avoid annual disaster losses caused by extreme weather, the Chinese government issued the “Urban Climate Change Action Plan” in 2016, and announced the first group of Climate Adaptive Pilot Cities in the country, encouraging local governments to formulate adaptation action plans including vulnerability and impact assessment, international cooperation, and substantially increase capacity in adapting to the changing environment. ICLEI East Asia and UNDRR are working closely to support local governments in China to address disaster risks at the local level, and to implement urban resilience objectives. The training series is designed to empower the public, private-public and civil society stakeholders to assess and address risks, ensure all public and private investments are risk-informed, and assure that early intervention in Chinese cities are directed to development in the long term.
What we are achieving
Between 2019 – 2020, EAS co-hosted two workshops for two Chinese cities to raise awareness of urban resilience with specific focuses on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction among local officials. The workshops were structured in sessions of concept and tools introduction. Assessments of local resilience were also conducted via group exercises followed by suggestions on improvements. EAS and UNDRR continue to work to support more local governments in China in implementing the Sendai Framework and other urban resilience objectives via workshops, now more likely online due to COVID-19. It is expected that local disaster risk reduction planning will be especially meaningful at times like these, and that via this training cities would be better equipped with skills to assess their respective risks, identify gaps, and ultimately lead to projects to address those gaps. A learning publication will be produced as the final output of the series, to share lessons learned on improving urban resilience in the context of global warming with other cities.

Focus areas

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