Catalyzing Resilience Action - Augmenting municipal finance for disaster and climate risk informed urban development

The global pursuit of sustainable development requires placing urban risk reduction and resilience as a key imperative. An urbanizing profile of humankind and concentration of development assets, infrastructure, socio-economic sectors and related demands calls for enhanced investments by cities in resilience and sustainability objectives. Despite ‘urbanization of risks’, less than half of cities have an explicit urban development strategy and barely 15% acknowledge DRR, CC and sustainability imperatives.

Cities and municipalities have identified access to disaster/climate risk finance as a major impediment hampering risk-informed development efforts. This resource crunch becomes critical dimensions in small and medium cities where budgets are barely sufficient to maintain administrative functions and services. This leaves insignificant resources for investments in risk-informed and resilient local infrastructure development and socio-economic assets. An MCR2030 survey of local governments (2021) revealed concerns in terms of accessing risk financing options (with a capacity to develop bankable projects). This entails enhancing the capabilities of municipalities for finance and for attracting investible projects – duly informed by risk-informed urban development considerations.

With resilience objectives permeating the 2030 Agenda, a re-look at risk-development nexus in cities supported by augmented access of municipalities to international finance and domestic revenue streams has assumed renewed urgency.

The rationale for fostering risk-informed urban development is rooted in the acknowledgment that the current trajectory of conflicts, disaster/climate and related risks is manifesting increasingly in cities and urban contexts as a complex set of socio-economic processes combine to create risks of multiple hues which interact with governance deficits, resource and capacity constraints and interact to produce cascading and systemic effects, create newer risks or re-shape risks.

Noting the UN SG’s exhortation that SDGs can only be reached if they are reached at each of the different municipalities”, means greater efforts to augment urban finance to advance risk-informed urban development and contribute to the overall resilience and sustainability objectives.

The Networking Event will bring together organizations working on urban risk-resilience and disaster/climate finance and municipal capacity building related issues, regional intergovernmental organizations, technical and research institutions, private sector and key stakeholders to deliberate upon the need to catalyze resilience action with specific focus on augmenting urban governance, municipal finance and strengthening decision-making processes at city/municipal level to advance risk-informed urban development.
Mobilizing national/local governments, risk management and urban development agencies, and stakeholders, the Event will focus on the need to invest in resilience at city level.