Making Cities Resilient Campaign: Delft and Dordrecht share best practices

On 19 November, the cities of Delft and Dordrecht held a high-level kick-off meeting to jointly discuss the progress they made to build resilience to disasters, using the Self-Assessment Tool of UNISDR (the 10 Essentials). The meeting was attended by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment and facilitated by UNESCO-IHE. About 2500 cities across the world have signed up to participate in this effort.

Checklist for resilient cities

The ten-point checklist of Essentials for Making Cities Resilient has demonstrated to provide practical guidance for Delft and Dordrecht to understand the risks they are facing and to frame future actions. The Essentials aim to support local governments to get ready, reduce the risks and become resilient to disasters. In the Netherlands, Delft and Dordrecht are the first cities to take part in the UNISDR campaign.

Both cities have expressed the wish to engage with other UNISDR cities in order to share best and next practices; the Deputy Mayor of Dordrecht mentioned two-way learning as one of the major benefits of the campaign. The initiative of UNISDR to develop an online ‘market’ place to foster City-to-City learning has, therefore, been well received by the two cities.

As part of the Second Cycle of the Local Hyogo Framework for Action, both cities will report their recent achievements to the UNISDR. The lessons learned from the self-assessment and short-term actions will be presented at the UNISDR workshop in Incheon, Korea, from 16 to 17 December. Furthermore, the Netherlands will play an active role at the UNISDR World Conference in Sendai, Japan, which will be held from 14 to 18 March 2015.