27 May 2013: The UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) highlighted its City Resilience Profiling Programme (CRPP) during a side event titled ‘Building Safer and Resilient Cities and Settlements,’ held at the Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) in Geneva, Switzerland. CRPP aims to develop a comprehensive, integrated urban management and planning approach to monitor city risk resilience, including to climate change and multi-hazard catastrophic events.
CRPP aims to achieve five goals in the next five years: an adaptable urban systems model for human settlements; indicators, profiles and standards to support cities in calibrating urban systems’ ability to withstand and recover from crisis; development of city resilience profiles and tools; global standards for urban resilience; and a UN-HABITAT normative framework to monitor urban systems globally. This last goal aims to support resilience monitoring through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in line with the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20) Outcome Document.
During the side event, Abhilash Panda, UN Office for DRR (UNISDR), said cities and local governments are improving governance capacity for conducing risk assessments and developing urban planning regulations, but noted challenges in incorporating risk assessment into building codes and development planning. Eddie McLaughlin, Marsh Risk Consulting, described how his company will contribute to CRPP implementation through indexing and modeling six characteristics of resilience: recovery; response; redundancy; resourcefulness; robustness; and level of integration or cooperation among urban systems. The First Deputy Mayor of Nice, France, presented “Risques Nice,” a free mobile application that enables citizens to subscribe to disaster alerts, report street disorder and obtain information on hazard prevention.
UN-HABITAT is testing and refining the Programme’s guidelines and tools in ten partner cities: Balangoda, Sri Lanka; Barcelona, Spain; Beirut, Lebanon; Dagupan, the Philippines; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Lokoja, Nigeria; Portmore, Jamaica; Concepcion, Chile; Tehran, Iran; and Wellington, New Zealand. [UN-HABITAT Press Release] [Programme Brochure]