Making Cities Resilient-UNDRR

 
 

Dear participating cities and stakeholders of the Making Cities Resilient Campaign,   Ten years ago, in 2010, the Making Cities Resilient (MCR) Campaign was launched at the Resilient Cities event organized by ICLEI in a city of Bonn, Germany, as a global advocacy campaign aiming to raise awareness on disaster risk reduction and resilience at the local level.

Over the past ten years 4,360 cities worldwide have joined the Campaign and benefited from the Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient, the Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities and various other tools and knowledge products, resulting in enhanced understanding and collaboration as well as the development of local DRR strategies and its implementation.   Though the MCR Campaign is ending in 2020, the legacy will continue through the new initiative “Making Cities Resilient 2030 (MCR2030)”. Building upon the ten-year experience of the MCR Campaign, MCR2030 will support cities with a clear roadmap and access to a suite of tools to reduce risks and build resilience. A collaboration among partners including the World Bank, Resilient Cities Network, UN-HABITAT, ICLEI, UCLG, WCCD, UNOPS, IFRC, JICA and others, it aims to support cities through advocacy, planning and implementation of risk reduction and resilience plans. MCR2030 will be operational from January 2021 until the end of 2030. The ultimate aim of MCR2030 is to ensure cities become inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable by 2030 as a direct contribution to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11) and other global frameworks for sustainable development action including the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement and the New Urban Agenda.   The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the MCR Campaign partners would like to acknowledge the engagement, support and contribution from all national and local governments, role model cities, champions, advocates, and all partners in each corner of the world. Without your support, the Campaign would not have been this successful in engaging cities in making their cities resilient. We look forward to our continued collaboration in the MCR2030! Bonn,  Germany, as a global advocacy campaign aiming to raise awareness on disaster risk reduction and resilience at the local level.

How the MCR Campaign has supported cities around the world?

Kathryn Oldham, Chief Resilience Officer, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), United Kingdom, one amongst the 56 Role Model Cities of the MCR Campaign, mentioned at the Launch of the Making Cities Resilient 2030 on 28 October 2020, “… We completed the Disaster Resilience Scorecard which led us to improve our governance mechanisms, broadened the range of stakeholders engaged in resilience and so further enhanced the recognition of DRR as a city priority. We have therefore been able to use the Making Cities Resilient Campaign as a springboard to enable systems to join together in thinking and planning around disaster resilience. When COVID struck, this meant that we were able to quickly bring together the whole city system to develop a cross-sector response to this disaster,”

Sioux Campbell, Disaster Management Community Resilience Officer, Cairns, Australia, shared at the MCR Campaign steering committee meeting in July 2020, “… what we need to do will become more challenging not only because of current circumstances but because the challenges have become harder and more complex. The findings from the Disaster Resilience Scorecard we ran a few years ago are starting to see results in terms of research and planning around major issues. I look forward to rerunning the Scorecard process and using the baseline measurement to build a future for us… and moving into a very uncertain future for the region due to the impacts of COVID.”

Liza Velle B. Ramos, Research and Planning Division Head, Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office of Makati City, the Philippines, shared with over 80 local government representatives at the 13th CITYNET Disaster Cluster Seminar on 25 November 2020 that Makati City has used the Public Health Addendum as a tool to revisit the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management on Health Plan and plan for COVID-19 recovery and discover the areas where the city is doing well and the gaps that need to be addressed, “… with these gaps, we were able to identify major activities that we need to do”. These include, for example, the need to revisit risk assessment and health scenario planning including plans for all sectors (education, economic, etc.), renovation/retrofitting of facilities for health hazard response, telemedicine and online consultation, and improvement, digitization of health data system and interoperability. Makati City continues to finalize the Disaster Risk Reduction Management on Health Plan and enhance the city’s COVID-19 recovery plan based on these findings.

The MCR Campaign and its tools have been well recognized by partners as the best place to start for cities. “This program [MCR] is not only beneficial to our current programme [Resilient Cities Network], but it has been hugely beneficial for the whole resilience agenda promoted and pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. From the very beginning of the Rockefeller funded resilience programmes [100 Resilient Cities], MCR Campaign has been a reference point. Cities that were engaged in MCR Campaign and used the tools were in lessons and experiences, and could explain to other cities how resilience could be useful to their processes,” stated by Braulio Eduardo Morera, Resilient Cities Network (GRCN), at the MCR Campaign Steering Committee Meeting in July 2020.

The MCR Campaign has also helped guide national government to support local governments in strengthening disaster risk reduction capacities. H.E. U. Khürelsükh, Prime Minister of Mongolia, shared at the launch of MCR2030, "During my tenure as Deputy Prime Minister of Mongolia, all 22 major cities in Mongolia joined the “Making Cities Resilient” UN Global Campaign in 2017, and I inform you that the Government of Mongolia has fulfilled its commitment to implement Target (e) of the Sendai Framework by 2020, and all our major cities have adopted [and] are implementing local DRR strategies as of today...Through this Campaign, I believe that we have been able to build better community disaster resilience and recognize an importance of local leadership in DRR."

Learn more about the MCR Campaign tools - https://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/toolkit

Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient

The Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient provides an underlying framework for understanding disaster risk reduction at the local level. It includes ten fundamental areas a city should pursue to ensure disaster risk reduction is integrated in various development sectors and inclusive of citizen, private sector, and other non-governmental bodies. The Ten Essentials helps cities to look at disaster beyond emergency response and recovery to strengthen disaster risk governance, in line with the priorities of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030.

Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities

Framed by the Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient, the Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities, a flagship tool of the MCR Campaign developed by IBM, AECOM, UNDRR and MCR Campaign partners with support from the European Commission and USAID, has also been widely used by local governments around the world to assess resilience progress and inform the development of local DRR strategies. Over 870 cities around the world have reported using the Scorecard. By the end of 2020, the Scorecard had been translated into 16 languages (Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Chinese, English, French, Italian, Korean, Mongolian, Polish, Portuguese (PT), Portuguese (BR), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish), all of which were at the demand of cities and member states. The translations were achieved with support from national governments and partners.

Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities – Public Health System Resilience Addendum

Recognizing the potential oversight of inadequate address of public health related hazards in disaster risk reduction planning, a Public Health System Resilience Addendum of the Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities (Public Health Addendum) was developed and published in 2018 by MCR Campaign partners.  This tool attracted a great interest and became a timely instrument at the time of COVID-19 supporting local governments in strengthening public health risk reduction in local DRR planning and implementation process.  Within 2020, the Public Health Addendum has swiftly been translated into 10 languages with development of accompanying excel tool for utilization and analysis in 8 languages.

Moving towards the Decade of Action with MCR2030

MCR2030 responds to the growing understanding of urban risk: how it has changed and is changing, and the impacts this will have on cities and citizens. It recognises the increasing need for a systemic, joined-up approach to risk reduction, that allows city leaders to plan for risk-informed development, and citizens to benefit. MCR2030 builds on lessons learned during the previous MCR Campaign implementation from 2010-2020.

Learn more about MCR2030 at https://mcr2030.undrr.org/