Building climate resilience: a simpler way to approach adaptation practice

Planning for adaptation is an urgent issue both to avoid public and private investments that make potential climate impacts worse, and to begin to integrate a more dynamic climate into all relevant aspects of decision-making. This poses challenges in framing adaptation, particularly for monitoring and evaluation. We are trying to anticipate future climate conditions and take measures to adapt now, but we won’t know if they will be successful for some time.

Trying to anticipate the nature of future climate risks is difficult not only because future climate events are uncertain, but because all the associated vulnerability factors – capacities, exposure, response sensitivity – are also changing anyway. It is not difficult to identify preferred long term outcomes, but it is hard to tell what needs to be done now to achieve those, or how we can measure incremental progress.

In the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN; funded by Rockefeller Foundation), we are experimenting with an alternative way of looking at the problem that simplifies this conundrum for practitioners. We have developed an Urban Climate Resilience Framework that includes Systems (ecosystems and infrastructure); Agents (actors / organizations); and Institutions (accepted practices). Practitioners at the field level can quickly grasp what this means for systems and agents they work with. Local partners can also develop sensible indicators of resilience.

This presentation will introduce the Climate Resilience Framework and discuss how the framework and indicators might be useful in monitoring progress in climate adaptation.