Climate change mitigation remains of utmost importance for governments and societies around the world
Excerpts from an insightful interview
Prepared by: Sandeep S.S
Where are we now in terms of urban resilience?
Nazmul Huq: Resilience is an umbrella concept that houses many interconnected issues, yet still lacks a definition that would allow us to standardize its monitoring across diverse contexts.
While urban resilience remains a moving target, difficult to pin down, and very much contextual, the last decade has seen an explosion of work on the subject, as the Resilient Cities Congress series has repeatedly witnessed and facilitated.
Today, many different actors at different scales are undertaking various initiatives and campaigns focused on improving urban resilience, while in parallel, resilience is now an academic discipline in its own right. In the future, academic knowledge and real-world practices and initiatives will need to collaborate more closely to increase knowledge sharing and learning between researchers and practitioners.
Is resilience only about climate change?
Nazmul Huq: No. Urban resilience is the ability of cities to anticipate, prevent, absorb and recover from shocks and stresses brought about by rapid environmental, technological, social and demographic changes, which can be caused by natural phenomena (flooding, earthquake, and epidemics), anthropogenic hazards (oil spill, radiation, system breakdown) or socio-economic crisis (political and social conflict, terrorism, economic crisis).
We have seen the COVID19 pandemic already push millions of people below the poverty line even in western societies which are supposedly resilient, while Texas’ recent snowstorm has caused unprecedented havoc and casualties.
These examples are painful reminders that actions to build resilience should not be attached to just one specific goal or sector. Resilience building is a continuous and integrated process, and societies need to embrace it to withstand uncertainties and disturbances.
What’s the Making of Resilient Cities 2030 program mean for the next decade of enaction?
Nazmul Huq: By participating in the MCR 2030, cities get to understand their status on the resilience journey. The campaign sets a three-stage resilience roadmap that cities can use to assess their level of resilience. Cities can then progress onto the next stage as they reach milestones based on set criteria and pledged commitments. The ultimate goal is for cities to mainstream Disaster Risk Reduction plans and to focus on monitoring and evaluation to ensure they achieve and maintain the resilience targets.
What role does resilience have to play in achieving climate neutrality?
Nazmul Huq: The impacts of climate change are already being felt and will continue to affect us all in the future. We need to be prepared, and we need to complement climate neutrality with resilience goals.
For instance, ICLEI’s Climate Neutrality Framework is built on three pillars of ambitious action that are focus on mitigation, namely (i) to drastically reduce and sequester greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (ii) to divest, repurpose and reinvest, and (iii) to offset and compensate any GHG emissions that cannot immediately be removed, reduced or avoided.
However, the framework also stresses the need to fundamentally shift from our current socio-economic models and systems towards more resilient ones that can provide buffers against uncertainties, ensuring that communities will become key owners and part of transformation rather than being left behind.
Even climate-neutral cities will need to become resilient and remain so through continuous efforts and reshaping.
Original Content: ICLEI
Image sources: Twitter, Purple roof
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