MCSR is a three-year initiative (ending 2019) by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), funded by the European Commission, that aims to improve the understanding of, and capacity to, address disaster risks and build resilience at the local level, including in crisis-prone cities. In addition, over 40 key partners, from local, regional and national governments, academia, practitioners, INGOs and CSO are engaged in supporting local implementation in the various beneficiary cities that seek to build the local government’s capacity to address risk and build resilience.

It is evident that increasing disaster risks present an immense challenge to the success of the SDGs and target actions. The application of disaster risk reduction measures and the building of resilience offers a strategic opportunity to ensure the success of the SDGs and ensure development gains are secure. Unless disaster risks are effectively managed, increasing disaster loss and impacts will continue to undermine efforts to reduce poverty and achieve sustainable development (UNISDR, 2015).

The recognition of the substantial role of disasters risk reduction and resilience is well emphasized in 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through the direct reference to the outcomes of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 and the numerous targets (25) across 10 out of the 17 SDGs.

Acknowledging the interlinkages between these two global agendas, the practice’s overall objective is the improvement of disaster risk reduction and resilience building in cities in all regions, particularly in least developed countries – LDCs - and small islands developing states - SIDs - through increased risk-informed investments and deeper understanding of risks locally. It builds on the achievements of the Hyogo Framework for Action – Building the Resilience of Nations 2005 - 2015 and paves the way towards the implementation of the Sendai Framework for DRR 2015 - 2013 at the local level, and the recently adopted New Urban Agenda.

The specific objective of the practice is to build the capacity of local governments to improve their understanding of, and capacity to, address disaster risks through awareness raising, tool implementation and risk analysis. The activity seeks to build the resident capacity of local governments, anchoring resilience across various institutions and creating a shared vision of resilience build by consensus. By addressing these common bottlenecks with tailored tools, the practice supports the development of local disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) strategies. Therefore, the practice contributes directly to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 11 ‘Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’, specifically targets 11.5 and 11.b, and facilitates the localization of SDG 1 ‘No Poverty’, target 1.5; SDG13 ‘Climate Action’, target 13.1; and SDG14 ‘Life Below Water’, Target 14.2.

The main and direct beneficiaries of this practice are local stakeholders, including local authorities and civil society actors in cities. Beneficiary cities face a range of hazards, from flooding and drought to demographic shifts and institutional obstacles and the practice entails identifying and implementing the best-fit tool and approach in each city from the Scorecard for Disaster Risk Reduction to the City Resilience Profiling Tool. Local governments are on the frontline dealing with shocks and stresses in cities, by bringing together key actors, mobilising knowledge of the local context and catalysing transformational action, this practice is empowering them to plan, coordinate, implement and support risk analysis and resilience planning.

The practice has global coverage and shared objective to support local capacity to address risk and build capacity. To reflect the needs of each partner city, a distinct set of result areas were identified.

Result 1 focuses on broad-based outreach and advocacy to increase local-level awareness and commitment towards more resilient communities.
Result 2 aims to build new and adapt existing tools, to establish baselines and gather profiles of risk and resilience building data and information
Result 3 focuses on key issues and challenges in linking early interventions in crisis-prone cities to long-term sustainable development.
Result 4 focuses on enhancing capacity of cities and local governments in developing and facilitating the implementation of action plans for resilience through targeted profiling tools.
Result 5 focuses on enhancing capacity to develop and implement plans to increase resilience in crisis-prone cities.

Results 1, 2 and 4 focus on ensuring that disaster risk reduction and disaster resilience building remain high on the local and global agenda through active outreach and advocacy efforts effectively implemented within the Making Cities Resilient global campaign. These results focus on developing various tools –quick risk estimation and Disaster Resilience Scorecards for Cities–and complementary resource materials (guidelines, training materials, etc.) to support practical efforts towards developing DRR strategies at the local level.

Results 3 and 5 focus on developing and implementing an in-depth and robust resilience measurement tool, designed from the perspective of ‘urban system’ rather than focussing on one group of stakeholders or one hazard. This approach, channelled through the City Resilience Profiling Tool, seeks to build transformative change in urban contexts by overcoming silos in conceptualising urban resilience from different sectors and functions within cities. To achieve these results, the project works with city actors to influence the data agenda, explore joint actions for resilience building and promote synergies.

The implementation of the project is designed in such a way as to ensure logical coherence and interlinkages between the results within each stream of implementation while also responding to the primary needs of the beneficiary cities. Results 1, 2, and 4 are linked in such a way that the cities committed to the MCR campaign are provided a clear signpost to take DRR further through self-assessment and DRR Action Plan. Similarly, results 3 and 5 are designed for cities with increased commitment to holistic resilience building and seeking to define resilience actions through participatory processes. The conceptual coherence between both streams suggests that the cities that have graduated from results 1,2, and 4 could further embark on exploring broader sets of variables to measure more nuanced urban resilience across various dimensions of results 3 and 5.

The practice has effectively progressed towards the realisation of the results and the achievement of the Sendai Framework in target cities. Outstanding outcomes have been achieved through innovative partnerships and the various modalities employed including city-to-city exchange programmes allowing cities to learn from each other’s experience and city-wide collaboration to identify risks and plan action.

The major outputs achieved by this project are listed below:
- Increased commitments made towards the implementation of the Sendai Framework for DRR 2015-2030 with an additional 1,442 cities committing to resilience.
- 196 have assessed their gaps in addressing local resilience through the Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient tool.
- Five cities have developed DRR Action plans before the project end, while the other 20 are on-track to deliver in 2019.
- Four cities have collected and evaluated resilience and risk data on their cities (through 140 indicators) using a city-wide collaborative and consensus-building approach. Two of these cities will deliver targeted Actions for Resilience in early 2019 with two more to follow in 2019.

In all result areas, notable attention has been given to engage vulnerable groups and address cross-cutting issues of gender, youth, climate change, informality and human rights. By integrating these consideration into the design of the tools and the training delivered in cities, the practice is building the capacity in target cities to understand and address these issues.

Local governments participating in the project show high commitment to the objectives and agenda of the project. This commitment is driven by the urge to address plausible hazards in their cities, hazards that are increasingly exacerbated by climate change trends and an array of new and magnified challenges. Nevertheless, a number of constraints impacted on this practice:
- Lack of adequate understanding by local governments of DRR and resilience. This in turn hinders efforts of bringing key stakeholders to common understanding of DRR and ensure systematic self-assessment processes.
- Lack of coordination mechanisms among the different key stakeholders and and social inclusion within pilot cities.
- Lack of coordination among the different level of governance, either national level is reluctant to support, or developments at the local levels are less aligned with national priorities. Similarly, lack of coordination among the local governments’ departments constitutes challenges to implementation processes.
- Unclear roles and responsibilities among stakeholders and difficulties in sharing data and information necessary for the development of the DRR Action Plan.
- Lack of financial resources at the municipal level is hindering the municipality participation in the process, as it cannot allocate funds for the implementation of the DRR Action Plan.
- Insufficient human resources to undertake essential follow-up and monitor the implementation of actions.
- Lack of systematic data recording, inability to quantify impacts of disasters (property loss, injuries and deaths, financial loss etc.).

The regular monitoring and evaluation of the project shows that there is a noticeable change observed towards strengthening various resilience capacities at the local level, namely better understanding of DRR and resilience, enhanced inclusion to engage a larger group of stakeholders, strong political commitment, institutionalised resilience mechanisms within municipalities, data availability, understanding of resilience profiles, availability of resources to support resilience-building actions, among others.

Findings also suggest that regular feedback loops will prove instrumental in the calibration and technical adjustments to the tools and guides deployed through this practice. Securing financial investments for executing actions and strategies is a major challenge to the sustainability of the resilience building efforts in beneficiary cities. Therefore, a major finding here is that by providing assistance to cities on how to support investment requirements with an evidence base and engage potential financial partners in resilience analysis, the sustainability of such initiatives is increased. Clarity and feasibility of resilience and DRR actions are also increased through this practice and these serve to attract investment.

Building on the success of partner cities in this practice and making the methodologies and tools developed through the results available to a wider public of local governments, this action establishes the necessary conditions for wide-scale up-scaling of local resilience building efforts.

Resilience offers a crucial meeting point among different yet essentially similar paradigms in urban development. To be truly resilient, cities should work towards sustainability and ensure positive long-term impacts, in the same manner, being truly sustainable entails incorporating resilience to drive and protect development goals. By engaging local governments and stakeholders in resilience efforts and DRR, cities have the ability to harness transformational change and improve the lives of their inhabitants. This has been notably acknowledged by the global community through Sustainable Development Goals and other prominent global agreements such as the New Urban Agenda, Paris Agreement, and Sendai Framework. However, in almost all contexts, specifically in least developed countries, cities lack the capacity to operationalize these alone and fully harness change due to lack of technical and financial capacities and lack of coordination mechanisms among different governance levels.
Making Cities Sustainable and Resilient Action: implementing the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 – 2030 at the local level is particularly relevant for the SDGs Good Practices as it presents a remarkable example of inter-agency initiative within the UN family, particularly UNISDR (focal point in the United Nations system for the coordination of disaster reduction) and UN-Habitat (focal point for all urbanisation and human settlement matters within the UN system) to ensure coherence and build synergies across operations while addressing urban resilience from different angles, each of which can be seen as a value-action in itself, yet together it creates an incremental process towards building disaster resilience in urban contexts. The conceptual coherence between both agencies' work streams allows the practice to cater to the needs of all cities taking into account their capacity to address risk and build resilience and identify best-fit tools.

Partner cities of the City Resilience Profiling Tool: http://urbanresiliencehub.org/cities/
Making Cities Resilient Campaign: https://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/
Tools developed and piloted through the practice: http://urbanresiliencehub.org/tools-for-action/
About the practice: http://urbanresiliencehub.org/making-cities-sustainable-and-resilient-action/