Strategic planning tools for urban resilience: city-to-city exchange on local resilience planning

The resilience-building process at local level requires skills and methodologies that are often not at hand in city administrations. In order to enhance cities' capacity to resist, absorb and recover from the effects of climate change, a EU-funded project, named Smart Mature Resilience is developing standardized approaches and tools to support the design of climate adaptation and resilience strategies. The training event will present the tools developed by the project, discuss how these contribute to the overall resilience building process and how they feed into an integrated management system for resilience planning that can be transferred to the local context of other cities, regions and countries.

Considering a co-creation approach in the methodology has enabled to gather and understand what cities are expecting from this integrated management system for resilience, the so-called Resilience Management Guideline. All the information gathered has helped cities to highlight the existing challenges regarding resilience at the local level. Identifying what city stakeholders require to increase the city resilience level and the barriers that still need to be overcome has been helpful to define the specific requirements that each of the five tools included in the European Resilience Management Guideline should fulfill.

The European Resilience Management Guideline was co-created and co-developed by all project partners, while it was projected, tested and validated by 18 cities around Europe so far. The collective feedback from all cities showed that informing thoroughly stakeholders and city representatives is important and necessary in order to secure their active participation and involvement. The session at the 9th World Urban Forum aims to bring these tools to a wider group of city representatives from around the Globe that will be able to test the tools and get material (the tools themselves, train-the-trainer handbooks) back to their countries.

The Resilience Management Guideline is better described as a journey with one step following the other, where cities and regions have different starting points. But, what are the benefits for cities that have in place and use an integrated management system to monitor their resilience building activities? The Resilience Management Guideline and the SMR resilience tools contribute to the SDG11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable and the SDG13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. It provides the cities that receive training on how to use it and implement it in their local context with benefits, that only some of them are listed here: 1) increased awareness on climate change adaptation, resilience and sustainability; 2) improved quality of management at local level and across the various municipal departments; 3) enhanced transparency and advanced monitoring action; 4) increased trust in local governance; 4) increased number of engaged citizens through co-creation activities; 5) contribution to a sustainable and resilient economy and, last but not least, 6) provision of better perspectives for a bottom-up inclusive EU, something that cities nowadays tend to promote and seek, especially in the outset of austerity.