Cities Alliance Annual Report 2018

Two of the projects undertaken through the JWP closed in 2018: The Urban
Community Resilience Assessment (UCRA), and a second undertaken by C40
on city climate action planning. Two new projects were launched, one that looks
at indicators and data to measure sustainable, resilient cities and a second on
adaptation diplomacy.
I was reassured by
atmospheric and
physical scientists
clearly stating that
informality will be
front and centre of
the global research
agenda that is
being developed.
- Cities Alliance Urban
Environment Specialist
Julie Greenwalt
BRINGING INFORMALITY INTO THE DISCUSSION AT THE
CITIESIPCC CITIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE
In March 2018, Cities Alliance coorganised the CitiesIPCC Cities and Climate
Change Science Conference, which brought together scientists, city representatives,
and urban practitioners for the first time to discuss cities and climate change and to
inspire new research.
As a partner and co-sponsor, Cities Alliance played an important role in building the
partnership for the conference as well as organising and promoting it.
On a substantive level, Cities Alliance strongly advocated addressing informality
and urban poverty at the event. Cities Alliance also stressed the message that any
global research agenda on cities and climate change must be inclusive of all types
of cities, especially emphasising secondary cities and the growing cities of the
global south, which were well represented.
Cities Alliance's message on informality and informal settlements as a necessary
part of research and action moving forward was resoundingly heard. The view of
informality as an important issue when addressing climate change in cities was
visible throughout the conference and in all the plenary sessions.
The main outcome of CitiesIPCC was the Research and Action Agenda on Cities
and Climate Change. For more about the Agenda, and two other major global
climate change events that the Cities Alliance was involved with, see Box 6.
PROJECTS
Urban Community Resilience Assessments (UCRA)
Cities Alliance provided US $200,000 in funding to the World Resources Institute
(WRI) to work on UCRAs in three cities: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Surat, India; and
Semarang, Indonesia. WRI worked closely with 100RC and SDI on the project, which
closed in 2018.
Developed by WRI with input from community and city leaders, the UCRA is a
tool that takes planning for resilience to the neighbourhood level. This is a new
approach for resilience, which is usually assessed at the city level. It is also an
important one, as there can be big differences in how various neighbourhoods
within a city experience risk.
For example, in Semarang, the project found that three neighbourhoods in the
city faced three different risks – sea level rise, inland flooding, and erosion – and
assessed the vulnerabilities and capacities accordingly.
In Surat, the project looked at an older slum neighbourhood that was at least 12
years old, as well as a recently established slum. It found that the vulnerabilities are
different; social cohesion was better in the older slums, but the infrastructure was
much worse, meaning that the neighbourhood had greater resilience on the social
side and less on the physical side.
The project also recognised that cities are not the same across the board, and that
solutions can be found related to what people have available. For example, in Rio,
86 per cent of people have smart phones, so they can be used to notify residents in
case of a disaster or weather-related risk. In Semarang, people still use drums as an
alert system.
42 Cities Alliance