The newly published UNDP Urban Risk Management and Resilience Strategy has identified five Strategic Priorities for policy and programmatic action, focusing on urban resilience through a multidimensional lens.įirst, UNDP will give more focus to neglected geographies where greatest capacity gaps exist, such as small, medium and transitioning cities in LDCs, low- and middle-income countries and SIDS, including cities in or on margins of crisis/fragile contexts. The new UNDP Urban Risk Management and Resilience Strategy has identified five strategic priorities for policy and programmatic action to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 11 on sustainable cities and communities.ĭriven by this sense of new urgency, UNDP is revisiting its urban risk management and resilience-building practices through a multifaceted approach. In parallel, particular city contexts tend to amplify their effect on weaker segments of society, leaving them further behind due to high socio-economic vulnerabilities and pre-existing structural issues like poverty, inequality, migration, informality, etc. The increasing “urbanization of risks” is making them even more systemic, with cascading impacts across all walks of life and inter-dependent sectors of development – lingering much beyond their immediate occurrence. In fact, crises and risks of all types tend to converge in cities. In fact, the World Bank projects that COVID-19 may have pushed an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty, with a majority engaged in informal services and living in congested urban settings.Ĭrises are no longer stand-alone or episodic. This disconcerting scenario is compounded by the location of many high-risk cities in challenging development contexts such as least developed countries (LDCs), low-income countries (LICs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDs), coupled with considerable governance deficits and resource constraints. According to UNDRR, nearly 84 percent of the fastest growing cities face extreme climate and disaster risks the vast majority of which are in Asia and Africa. More than ever before, a multitude of risks are manifesting themselves with higher frequency, greater magnitude and cascading impacts in cities.
The pandemic has exposed the “soft underbelly” of our urban development, governance and risk management systems. We know that the impact of COVID-19 has been predominantly urban (nearly 90 percent of people affected, according to a UNSDG Policy Brief), and most significant socio-economic disruption has occurred in cities. Urban resilience – the ability of city dwellers to withstand economic, social, health, environmental, disaster and climate related risks – has assumed renewed urgency and has become central to our development discourse. With this figure projected to rise to two thirds by 2050, the need for development action in cities can no longer be overlooked. Incredibly, over half of humanity already lives in urban settings.
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