Climate resilience (original) (raw)
Resilience that protects
Climate change is leading to increasingly frequent and more severe natural hazards. Poor people are least able to predict natural hazards, prepare for them and protect themselves against their impacts.
That’s why we embed climate change adaptation across all of our work; in energy access, agriculture, disaster resilience and urban WASH and waste management.
We’re helping to make resilience a way of life, by advising people on how to adapt their lives to a changing climate and put plans and early warning systems in place to predict natural hazards and stop them turning into disasters. We’re contributing to joint efforts to promote environmentally sound technologies for low carbon and climate resilient development.
For people
Increasing climate resilience
Empowering people to predict and withstand natural hazards and move forward
For planet
Using nature-based solutions
To protect property, crops and possessions from natural hazards and prevent further damage
For big change
Informing global and national policies
To tackle the climate crisis and support the people most at risk
Our resilience focus
We define resilience as the ability of a system, community, or society to pursue its social, ecological, and economic development and growth objectives, while managing its disaster risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way. This captures the essential forward-looking component of resilience; we do not want people to be resilient while denying their aspirations to improve their wellbeing.
We will continue to grow our work on flood resilience, developing new work in Africa and urban settings. We will use our influence to increase support and funding for community and nature-based solutions and early action to avert multiple hazards and minimise loss and damage for climate vulnerable communities.
- Advising people on how to adapt their lives to a changing climate
- Helping communities put systems in place to predict natural hazards and prepare plans to minimise their impact.
- Promoting environmentally sound technologies for low carbon and climate resilient development.
By 2025, our work with partners will have enhanced risk knowledge systems so that 4 million people living in hazard-prone, climate-vulnerable communities are better protected.
What makes us different
- We know how to design, and get effectively delivered, early warning and climate information systems that meet the needs of communities, with a particular focus on the needs of women and other people who face specific social barriers. This helps keep them safe from floods and other extreme weather events.
- We understand the realities of climate risk for communities and solutions that work for them.
- We have seats in key international committees and advocacy networks and are adept at getting the perspectives of communities heard, influencing policy makers, and other organisations such as insurance companies, to adapt their approaches so that they help reduce and mitigate these risks.
- We use evidence to influence across multiple scales, to ensure national and global risk management systems deliver for the people who need them most.
Policy and influence
A systemic approach is critical to the success of our work. This means not working with communities in isolation, but bringing together all actors – including the private sector, and local and national governments – with a role to play in shaping the risk environment.
We embed climate change as a cross-cutting theme across our four thematic areas. This work is climate smart and is designed to equip poor people to adapt to a changing climate and cope with severe weather events, while also capturing evidence and knowledge to generate the political will necessary to deliver this at scale.
- We will put poor people central to the climate change agenda to ensure that mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage actions deliver for and do not compromise the development choices of the poorest. Only by increasing the resilience of those most at risk will the risk exposure of the whole community be reduced.
- In the countries where we are working we will explore the causal relationship between climate change and natural hazards to help people better cope with uncertainty and underlying risk.
- We will work with all stakeholders including the private sector to understand the role that markets play (both positively and negatively) in building the resilience of the poorest and most vulnerable.
- We will call on governments and other key stakeholders to integrate Disaster Risk Reduction into their policies.
- We will understand the links between smallholder farmers, climate change and opportunities to benefit smallholder farming systems that address the climate challenges making markets work for poverty reduction, food security and environmental sustainability.
- We aim to better understand climate change as a trigger for human migration. As climate stresses increase more people will choose short term temporary migration as well as permanent migration as a mitigation action.
The people who pollute the least are the most affected by climate change. We’re helping poor communities make climate resilience a way of life.
Knowledge & Expertise
Learn more from the work we're doing to make resilience a way of life, to predict disasters and minimise their impact and to promote environmentally sound technologies for low carbon and climate resilient development. Explore a sample of our reports, policy papers, technical information and publications.
Early Warning Systems
Early Warning Systems predict and prepare for extreme weather and give people the opportunity to take action, save lives, and reduce the impacts of disasters.
Futures beyond flooding
For six years, we’ve been part of the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance. This partnership brings together risk expertise from within the private sector, research institutes and humanitarian and civil society organisations to help people rebuild their homes and improve their livelihoods.
Through the Alliance, we share what we learn and gain new insight from our partners. By managing the Alliance’s Flood Resilience Portals, we help people around the globe find better solutions for building flood resilience.
Tackling landslides in India
We’re partnering with 11 organisations, including Amrita University and the UK Met Office, so that communities in areas vulnerable to landslides can become more resilient to them.
This collaboration is bringing together physical and social scientific expertise to improve landslide risk assessment and early warning. Together, we’re working to develop understanding of the factors which trigger landslides, so that decision-makers in India can plan more effectively.
Preparedness in the Pacific
We’re working with Asian Development Bank to conduct research into gender and social inclusion within Baguio City and give guidance to ensure their flood early warning systems are designed to be inclusive of needs of the most vulnerable.
Placing people at the centre will impact the way in which the entire early warning system is designed. The context and the needs and capabilities of communities should inform, for example, the type of sensors used, which maps and information are produced, who’s included in preparation, and how to actually send out the warnings.
Science for resilience
We’re collaborating with experts in physical and social sciences and in NGOs to provide the knowledge, tools and capacity to enhance understanding of risk and increase the resilience of communities.
Across over 100 projects, implemented by almost 70 research institutions, universities, meteorological agencies, international and local NGOs around the world, we’re working to strengthen the understanding and monitoring of risk. In doing so, we’re improving the reliability and application of forecasts for decision-making, early warning systems, financing, and disaster resilience.