Urbanization and climate change represent fundamental transformation. Climate change means that climate conditions, including natural hazards, are increasingly uncertain and unpredictable, while urban growth, especially in many parts of the developing world, means that more people are living in these vulnerable cities, facing new hazards and risks.
The Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) was one of the first major programs worldwide to work directly at the city level to apply knowledge of resilience to urban and climate change issues. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, ACCCRN brought together a range of national and international organizations across India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam to develop, apply, and refine tools and techniques for building urban climate change resilience (UCCR).
In each city, stakeholders, country coordinator organizations and regional partners carried out an iterative process of building resilience that included conducting vulnerability assessments, developing resilience strategies, and implementing intervention projects. These intervention projects, in particular, accounted for a large proportion of the time, energy, and resources in ACCCRN. None of these projects stand out on their own as ‘resilience’ projects—all projects could have been conducted under many different urban, environmental, or development programs. However, within ACCCRN, these projects incorporated specific project and process design elements that, in addition to the specific benefits they provided, contributed to overall UCCR. Based on experience conducting projects in ACCCRN, there are core elements of projects that ensure they contribute to resilience.
This report draws on experience implementing projects across ACCCRN in order to better understand the role of projects within resilience processes as well as the characteristics of projects that enabled them to build resilience.