BANGKOK’S RESILIENCE CHALLENGE Ten million people, many poor and vulnerable, call this flood-prone metropolis home.
In addition to a bustling tourism industry, Thailand’s capital city is home to 10 million residents within 1,500 square kilometers. Nearly half the population comes from other provinces and countries, seeking better opportunities, and many are considered poor and vulnerable. In 2011, Bangkok experienced a severe flood with estimated damages of $45 billion to global supply chain, out of which only $10 billion were insured. This sparked the development of a manual for flood management that includes lessons for resilience building. However, technical expertise and financial resources for creating and executing resilience strategies remain limited.
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Experts brainstorm ways to fund cities to withstand disasters - By Alisa Tang
BANGKOK (Thomson
Reuters Foundation) - Governments must persuade businesses to invest in
protecting cities from natural disasters, and climate and development
experts should heed the needs of poor communities hardest hit by climate
catastrophes, experts said.
Some 80 percent of global wealth is generated in
cities, so the private sector has an interest in protecting those
assets, according to Peter King, who works for a USAID project that
helps Asia-Pacific countries polish climate adaptation projects and
access funding.
“Cities can actually make the case, ‘We want to make
our cities resilient to protect your assets, and you can pay for it,’”
King, adaptation project preparation and finance team leader for USAID
Adapt Asia-Pacific, told a forum on urban resilience.
“I think the challenge is then for the cities to make
the private sector realize that (spending to protect) these public
goods, in terms of climate resilience, is good for them in terms of
protecting their own assets.”
King spoke on a panel about financing urban resilience,
at a three-day Resilient Cities Asia Pacific conference last week. It
brought together city officials, development experts and researchers
from 100 cities in 30 countries in Asia, North America and Europe.
Asian cities are often located in disaster-prone coastal areas, river deltas and floodplains.
The Asia-Pacific region is the one most affected by
disasters. It had 714,000 deaths from natural disasters between 2004 and
2013, more than treble the previous decade, and economic losses topping
$560 billion, according to the United Nations.
King of USAID described catastrophe bonds, pension
funds and trillions of dollars of assets under management, adding that
doing more “financial engineering or financial manipulation" could make
existing funds available to cities, and make the case for the generation
of additional funding.
In order to help cities focus on and invest in climate
adaptation and resilience, the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient
Cities project is creating a new job, the chief resilience officer, in
city governments around the world.
However, researcher David Dodman said the climate
adaptation sector was making the same mistake development agencies had
made by not homing in on the needs of poor communities.
The sector was slow to recognize the particular needs
of low-income urban residents and was using "woefully inadequate“
definitions of poverty to identify "the scale and extent of poverty and
need," said Dodman, of the International Institute for Environment and
Development.
He pressed for decentralized funds to help at-risk
communities – on the scale of $20,000 grants, rather than $20 million as
may be granted by large donors – and for “co-production”, where
solutions are identified by marginalized, vulnerable low-income groups.
“This, in combination with the actions of national
governments and financing from different scales, has been demonstrated
to make significant differences in terms of the provision of shelter ...
basic services ... water, sanitation and hygiene solutions in towns and
cities,” Dodman said.
Red Constantino, executive director of the
Philippines-based Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, pressed
the need for letting communities track the large amounts of adaptation
money going into developing countries.
“Access to
information not only helps to improve projects, programs and
initiatives, it allows for better design. It allows for higher chances
for success,” said Constantino, who helped launch adaptracker.org, which
allows local governments, civil society and community groups to follow
the money.
The program improves public participation to ensure
there is better delivery of resources on the ground, he said, calling
for more focus on crowd sourcing projects for better designs and
involving communities to let them determine what they need and how to
make the project work more effectively.