Partners for Resilience (PfR) is a unique initiative that promotes the building of resilience across nine countries on three continents, combining different humanitarian, environmental and development approaches and resulting in eco- and climate-smart disaster risk reduction (DRR). See this introductory film and a map.

This CDKN project built on PfR experience in Indonesia and the Philippines and translated it into tools and approaches used worldwide to influence policies that enhance community resilience.

This project met an urgent demand for support to climate-smart disaster risk reduction at the local level as a contribution to climate-compatible development.

Background to PfR:

Five organizations – the Netherlands Red Cross, CARE Nederland, Cordaid, Wetlands International and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre –joined forces as the ‘Partners for Resilience’ to reduce the impacts of natural hazards on vulnerable communities.

The largest programme of its kind in the world, PfR was an unprecedented opportunity for engagement in global, regional, national and local policy dialogues. Its DRR work with rural and urban communities integrated climate and ecosystem so that, through increased resilience, people are better able to withstand shocks and bounce back.

The programme tested new and combined approaches to building community resilience, shared lessons, and helped influence policy.

Objectives of the Project:

The project helped civil society organizations shape policy on climate-smart resilience with the benefit of experience in Indonesia and the Philippines. Over three years, CDKN contributed to:

•  Developing the ‘Minimum Standards’ (see below) for climate-smart DRR.
• Facilitating climate-smart tools for practitioners and policy-makers for community risk reduction.
• Sharing project experience for learning, dialogue and policy across levels and regions.
• Developing educational games for enabling dialogues between communities, providers of climate information, government, and humanitarian and development workers.

CDKN Funding: GBP 324,000

Project Manager: Fareeha Irfan Ovais (fovais@lead.org.pk)

Recent Updates

The project team developed a consolidated version of the Minimum standards for local climate-smart disaster risk reduction (‘the Minimum Standards’) to bridge national climate policy and local efforts.

Lessons from the Minimum Standards were included in a working paper for the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction in 2015. They have also been discussed at:

• 5th Global Forum on Urban Resilience and Adaptation
• 1st ISDR Asia Partnership
• 6th Asian Ministerial Conference on DRR
• Asia Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum
• APEC climate symposiums
• ICLEI Resilient Cities conferences
• Red Cross Red Crescent training events on climate.

PfR shared their experience from community risk assessment in all nine programme countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, described in the CDKN blog Partnership counts the successes and challenges of building resilience.

Participatory games are key ingredients of the Climate Centre’s learning and facilitation approaches. With CDKN support the Climate Centre was able to significantly scale up its games programme in 2012 and reach at least 3000 stakeholders (see web story A Year of Games), including a ‘Climate Games Kit’.

The Climate Centre helped institutionalize the use of the Minimum Standards, games, and case studies to provide evidence of successful ‘integrated risk management’.

Games were also used with the Philippine Climate Change Commission, UNDP, and the Australian government at a workshop in the Philippines (see web story Paying for predictions at Tacloban media workshop on climate).

The CDKN project also supported ‘writeshops’ to synthesize experience as documented in Creating new paths to resilience and Local wisdom for the three pillars of resilience. Other writeshop outcomes are available at the PfR publications site.

Finally, the CDKN project helped PfR and the Climate Centre engage in the global humanitarian policy dialogue. Overall, the humanitarian diplomacy conducted by the Climate Centre as part of PfR has influenced the agendas of most recent regional and global agreements.

Lessons learned, tools and games, and local experience shared from PfR, partly based on CDKN support, have been applied and promoted, including at UN COP meetings, where diplomacy is supported by the high-profile Development and Climate Days events.

An additional example of high-level diplomacy aided by Climate Centre inputs and PfR is the announcement on how (web story) Red Cross Red Crescent worldwide will help deliver on new global goals.

Image courtesy of  Amirjina @ flickr creative commons