Future scenario planning

Supported by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the World Bank Group, the City Resilience Program (CRP) was launched as an effort to assist city governments to build greater resilient cities with the financial and technical capacity to prepare for, mitigate, or prevent adverse impacts of disasters and climate change.

This is a model to assess the socioeconomic resilience to natural disasters of an economy, defined as its capacity to mitigate the impact of disaster-related asset losses on welfare. Applied to riverine and storm surge floods, earthquakes, windstorms, and tsunamis in 117 countries, the model provides estimates of country-level socioeconomic resilience. Because hazards disproportionally affect poor people, each $1 of global natural disaster-related asset loss is equivalent to a $1.6 reduction in the affected country’s national income, on average.

The Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP) was formed in 2016 around a simple principle—Climate and socioeconomic data should be accessible and usable for everyone. PREP is a partnership of leading research institutions, government agencies, adaptation practitioners, and technology companies, working to empower communities and businesses around the world to build resilience to climate change by improving access to data, creating best-in-class tools, and helping people navigate the complicated resilience planning landscape.

Climate action for URBan sustainability (CURB) is an interactive scenario planning tool designed specifically to help cities take action on climate change. It was developed by C40 and the World Bank, in partnership with AECOM. The user-friendly tool allows cities to:

A City Development Strategy (CDS) is a tool that helps a city harness the potential of urbanization through strategic planning. It is an action-oriented process, developed and sustained through participation, to promote equitable growth in cities and their surrounding regions to improve the quality of life for all citizens.

The Quick Risk Estimation (QRE) tool has been designed for the purposes of identifying and understanding current and future risks / stress / shocks and exposure threats to both human and physical assets. The QRE Tool is not a full scale risk assessment, rather a multi-stakeholder engagement process to establish a common understanding.

Currently being built and tested, resilience.io is an open-source, cloud-based, scalable city-regional software platform linked to earth systems models. It enables communities anywhere to gather earth observation, economic, social and environmental data in a crowd sourced manner and build a dynamic 3D systems visualization of their region, land and sea. A game-based version for schools will enable children to explore how resources and gases flow as a result of human and ecological activity in their neighborhood and what impact this has on their local health.

This tool provides local policy-makers and major stakeholders with a methodology to plan for climate change. These plans must address both mitigation (e.g., reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) and adaptation (responding to the impacts of climate change). If they are to be effective, local plans for climate change (both adaptation and mitigation) require the involvement of a variety of stakeholders and a specific focus on the most vulnerable groups.

This Toolkit is a companion document for Planning for Climate Change: A strategic values-based approach for urban planners, a resource and planning guide developed
for city planners and other professionals to better understand, assess and take action on climate change at the local level.

The Interactive Resilient Africa Online Decision Support Tool forms part of a six step program that has been developed in con-junction with Local African governments with the sole purpose of assisting in the creation and implementation of adaptation plans in order to address the relevant climate change impacts currently faced by the specific local communities.