Building resilient cities

The Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), part of a $59 million, seven-year climate change resilience initiative supported by the Rockefeller Foundation was launched in 2009 to create climate resilience strategies and action models in 10 cities across four countries in Asia---Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and India.

Surat, Indore and Gorakhpur were the three pilot cities in India to have developed their resilience strategies under the ACCCRN network. Multiple stakeholders joined hands with the city governments to develop resilience strategies and identified pilot adaptation projects for implementation. A few more cities namely Guwahati, Shimla, Mysore and Bhubaneswar have been included in the replication and scaling up phase of the programme.

These experiences were shared in an international workshop on “Resilient Cities-Experiences from ACCCRN and beyond” organised by Teri with support from The Rockefeller Foundation last week, as part of the annual Delhi Sustainable Development Summit. The deliberations highlighted the need for capacity building of urban local bodies (ULBs) for planning future resilience strategies and addressing the current urban vulnerabilities by reducing the urbanisation pressures.

Policy makers and local city level governments must take a lead and guide their cities on a path of building resilience, which will simultaneously support ideals of good governance. Failure to do so could leave

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