At its core, urban climate resilience refers to the ability of an urban system – and its components – to absorb, adapt to, and recover from the various shocks and stresses exacerbated by climate change, while ensuring the well-being of its inhabitants. It is a multidimensional concept that spans across infrastructure, social systems, and governance:

• Infrastructure Resilience: This focuses on designing, constructing, and maintaining infrastructure that can withstand and bounce back from climatic events. This includes everything from building sea walls to protect against rising sea levels to designing green roofs that can help manage stormwater and reduce the urban heat island effect.
• Social Resilience: Even the best infrastructure can’t function without the people who maintain and utilize it. Social resilience emphasizes community preparedness, social cohesion, and ensuring vulnerable populations receive the resources and support they need before, during, and after a climate event.
• Governance and Policy Resilience: Policymakers play a crucial role in ensuring urban climate resilience. This includes developing and implementing policies that promote sustainable urban planning, encourage the use of renewable energy, and ensure that all community members, especially the most vulnerable, are considered in resilience planning.

Within the field of climate change adaptation, the focus is on addressing climate-related hazards that pose a threat to urban functions and the corresponding adaptation strategies. Nevertheless, it can also consider other natural hazards (e.g., geological events) to provide cities with a comprehensive approach for managing a wide range of natural shocks and stresses.

Cities are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Already, 70% of urban areas are affected by or at risk of climate change effects such as ever-rising temperatures and varying rainfall patterns.

By 2050, several billion urban dwellers will be affected. Typical urban features such as a high population and building density, surface sealing, and a lack of green space make cities vulnerable to external shocks, such as floods, landslides, and disease outbreaks, as well as stresses, such as urban heat island effects and water shortages. By 2050, one-third of all major cities worldwide could exhaust their current water resources (IPCC AR6 WGII). Inhabitants of informal settlements are particularly vulnerable – they often live in hazard-prone areas, such as steep slopes, coastal and river floodplains.

At the same time, resilience efforts are often focused on metro cities, while small- and medium-sized cities receive less attention. While dealing with the environmental effects of climate change, cities are also heavily challenged by socio-economic and technical deficiencies. Lack of financial resources as well as limited technical and institutional capacities to strengthen resilience and implement adaptation actions, hinder climate action, especially in developing countries.

Overview – A collection of more than 90 Urban Climate Resilience approaches across 30 different countries

Sharing experiences in urban climate resilience has become increasingly vital due to the interconnected and rapidly evolving nature of cities. Cities worldwide are facing the impacts of climate change, rapid urbanization, and various other challenges that demand resilient solutions. By exchanging knowledge and learning from one another, cities can accelerate their understanding and implementation of effective strategies to combat these challenges.

Sharing experiences enables cities to gain insights from both successes and failures. Instead of reinventing the wheel, cities can adopt proven best practices, saving valuable time and resources. Moreover, this process facilitates cost-efficiency, as replication of successful climate resilience strategies mitigates the costs associated with trial-and-error approaches.

While each city has its unique set of challenges, resources, and contexts, sharing experiences allows for customization and adaptability, enabling cities to tailor proven approaches to their specific circumstances. This adaptability is crucial in ensuring the effectiveness and relevance of resilience measures within diverse urban landscapes. It also promotes innovation and improvement, fostering a culture of continuous enhancement and optimization based on shared insights.

Scaling the impact of successful resilience strategies is another key benefit. Replication and upscaling allow cities to extend the reach of proven approaches, magnifying the positive effects across a broader scale and population. By replicating what has worked for one city in another facing similar challenges, a collective resilience effort is established.

GIZ has been implementing projects with a focus on Urban Resilience and working with strategic partners for about 10 years, although certain approaches which strengthened resilience had been applied before (e.g., flood risk management in urban areas). This wealth of experience on Urban Resilience jointly collected by the GIZ Urban Climate Resilience Task Force, is now available through a range of possible approaches to support and improve future projects implementation, knowledge exchange and enhance the visibility of good practices.  

The GIZ Urban Climate Resilience Toolbox is a repository of more than 90 different tried, tested, and ongoing resilience approaches in more than 30 countries. The approaches are clustered into different categories that define their features to facilitate the access to information for policymakers, practitioners, and those with a general interest in urban climate resilience actions or in implementing them on the local, national, and international level.

Click on the link and start exploring!

GIZ Urban Climate Resilience Toolbox