MCR2030: Fostering risk-informed urban development to advance urban resilience action.

Local governments are on the frontline of opportunity to reduce the impact of disasters–keep people out of poverty; protect hard-earned local development gains; and enable cities to become more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. Challenged by climate emergency, pandemic, and other shocks and stresses, resilience building can no longer be a stand-alone issue. It must take into consideration the inter-dependencies between sectors, interconnectedness of socio-economic factors, complexity of hazards and systemic nature of impacts. Understanding and assessing risks, both existing and potential ones, must become an integral part of urban development. Making Cities Resilient 2030 (MCR2030) is a 10-year global partnership to accelerate local resilience. MCR2030 provides a clear 3-stage Resilience Roadmap guiding cities towards taking a long-term and continuous approach to resilience investments from awareness raising to enhanced strategic planning and a whole-of-society approach to implementation. Mainstreaming risk-informed urban development is central to the MCR2030 Resilience Roadmap. Given the convergence of people, development assets, socio-economic processes as well as risks in cities, a narrow focus on a single hazard approach will not be sufficient to address the complexity of risks and their cascading effects across sectors. To make this happen, cities must consider the complex nature of risks, ambiguity and uncertainties in their planning and financing processes. They must break the silos, foster cooperation across all sectors and stakeholder levels, and strengthen the competences and institutional capacities of decision-makers to advance risk-informed urban development. This session provides insights to various approaches cities can take towards developing a risk-based decision-making process that helps make urban development more sustainable and resilient. It will show examples of how the MCR2030 Resilience Roadmap and risk-informed development approaches advanced by UN entities and partners help create synergies to support cities in mainstreaming risk-informed development. (1) The joint Initiative on Risk-Informed Urban Development by GIZ and 14 Southern African countries established by GIDRM and the Connective Cities programme, both commissioned by BMZ. (2) The joint cooperation between UNDP and UNDRR on urban resilience development aims at strengthening urban governance. It bridges the disconnect between the national policy and municipal level implementation and addresses issues related to underlying decision making and implementation to assure that DRR and adaptation become integral elements of development policy and practice. (3) The use of risk identification and profiling to inform the development of resilience actions by UN-HABITAT. It will also share the city experience in institutionalizing risk-informed urban development.