A new edition of the CDKN-supported minimum standards intended to bridge national climate policy and local capacities for disaster risk reduction (DRR) was released this week during the UNFCCC negotiations in Warsaw.

Since 2011 a group of NGOs based in Indonesia and the Philippines have been working together under the Partners for Resilience (PfR) programme in a unique partnership that is building the resilience of the most vulnerable in society. They are working 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.

As part of the partnership, they have been working on minimum standards for local climate-smart disaster risk reduction. These enable integration of local capacities into national climate adaptation strategies.

In 2012 the first version was published and then the team set out to get as much feedback as possible from civil society and governments worldwide, including from across the wider PfR network at a global work conference in The Hague in September. This new and improved version takes into account the suggestions they received.

As one of the participants said “the revised minimum standards are now much clearer and useful to our work”

The introduction to the document explains that; “The Minimum Standards are not idealized solutions but practical approaches to implement DRR [that are] achievable by communities with relatively limited external support”. This is a new approach to developing standards and has been well received internationally.

CDKN has supported this process under a three - year partnership with the PfR members. The aim is to 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.

Download the new Minimum Standards