Project reference: AAAS-0014

CDKN is working with the Partners for Resilience (PfR), a unique alliance between three humanitarian/development organisations and two environment/climate centres of expertise, to scale up the best practices of the partners.

It will extract lessons learned from PfR experiences and use them to shape policies – at a greater scale – that build community resilience to disasters and climate change.

This project in Indonesia and the Philippines meets an urgent policy demand for practice-based guidance and tools. It will support climate-smart disaster risk reduction at the local level, as a contribution to climate compatible development.

Background to PfR:

Five organisations – Netherlands Red Cross, CARE Nederland, Cordaid, Wetlands International, Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre – have joined forces as ‘Partners for Resilience Alliance’ (PfR) with the aim of reducing the impact of natural hazards on vulnerable communities in nine countries across the world. PfR is currently the largest programme of its kind at global level, allowing unprecedented opportunity for engagement in global, regional, national and local policy dialogues for more resilient communities.

The PfR work with both rural and urban slum communities on disaster risk reduction (DRR), explicitly integrating both the need to address a changing climate context, and the ecosystems context of many aspects of disaster risk. Through increased resilience people are better able to withstand shocks in their environment and have a greater capacity to secure and develop their livelihoods.

The programme is not just about community-level implementation of DRR interventions – it is also about identifying and testing new and combined approaches to building community resilience, and sharing the lessons to promote up-scaling and influencing policy development.

Objectives of the Project:

The project will inform and shape policies for scaling up climate-smart community resilience building, using evidence-based lessons learnt from PfR experiences in Indonesia and the Philippines. Over three years, the project will aim to achieve the following:

• Develop minimum standards that inform practise and contribute to adaptation policy by encouraging the inclusion of ‘climate smart’ disaster risk reduction at various levels;
• Facilitate adoption of climate smart participatory tools by practitioners and policy-makers for the development of community risk reduction plans;
• Develop games for enabling dialogues between communities, climate information providers, government and humanitarian/development actors: serious games that help to open mindsets and change policies for climate smart development;
• Global sharing of project experiences for learning, facilitating dialogues and influencing climate smart policy across levels and regions.

Watch an introductory film to PfR’s current work and view a map of where they work.

CDKN Funding: GBP 324,000

Project Manager: Elizabeth Colebourn

Recent Updates

The project team have published the first version of the‘Minimum Standards for local climate-smart Disaster Risk Reduction – enabling integration of local capacities into national climate adaptation strategies’ The intention is to find practical approaches that are achievable by many communities, and serve as an essential bridge between national climate policy and local capacities for DRR.

Image courtesy of  Amirjina @ flickr creative commons