Selecting Partner Cities for Climate Change Resilience

As the climate and natural disaster events rise, cities and communities must build resilience. Damages from a catastrophe can result in billions of property damages and loss of lives in seconds, and their impacts could last for many years.

Avoiding these impacts pushes governments to build resilience and become better equipped to face natural disasters.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 to 2030 encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing among cities as the best way to enhance resilience.

This approach has led to many resilience-building initiatives and collaboration networks over recent years, such as the 100 Resilient Cities program (100RC) pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2013 and the ‘Making Cities Resilient (MCR), which UNDRR launched in 2010.

The MCR agenda for the coming ten years (MCR 2030) advocates for promoting city-to-city partnerships and sharing of knowledge and experiences and addresses national governments to facilitate national-level programmes for local disaster risk reduction (UNDRR, 2020).

A study by Elrasheid Elkhidir, Sandeeka Mannakkara, and Suzanne Wilkinson, “Criteria for selecting partner cities in a national-level resilience network”, seeks to establish the main criteria for selecting suitable resilience partner cities in a national-level network.

Using a case study approach, focus group discussions and interviews with New Zealand’s five largest cities to collect data, the study finds the following criteria to look for when selecting partner cities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing on resilience:

• the similarity of hazards
• geographic proximity
• city resources and priorities
• resilience performance
• city size and demographics
• previous relationship
• willingness to collaborate
• similar industries.

Their findings will help cities interested in developing national-level resilience partnerships by selecting the most suitable partner cities.

Click the link provided in the “Source” section below to read the full research report.