Work

Supporting Climate Risk Management at Scale. Insights from the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance Partnership Model Applied in Peru & Nepal

Year: 2018

Type: book-chapter

Abstract: There has been increasing interest in the potential of effective scienceScience -society partnership models for identifying and implementing options that manage critical disaster risks “on the ground.” This particularly holds true for debate around Loss and DamageLoss and damage . Few documented precedents and little documented experience exists, however, for such models of engagement. How to organise such partnerships? What are learnings from existing activities and how can these be upscaled? We report on one such partnership, the Zurich FloodFlood ResilienceResilience Alliance, a multi-actor partnership launched in 2013 to enhance communitiesCommunities ’ resilienceResilience to floodingFlooding at local to global scales. The program brings together the skills and expertise of NGOs, the private sector and research institutions in order to induce transformational change for managing floodFlood risks. Working in a number of countries facing different challenges and opportunities the program uses a participatory and iterative approach to develop sustainable portfolios of interventions that tackle both flood riskFlood risk and development objectives in synergy. We focus our examination on two cases of Alliance engagement, where livelihoodsLivelihoods are particularly being eroded by flood riskFlood risk , including actual and potential contributions by climate changeClimate change : (i) in the Karnali river basin in West Nepal, communitiesCommunities are facing rapid on-set flash floods during the monsoon season; (ii) in the Rimac basin in Central PeruPeru communitiesCommunities are exposed to riverine floodingFlooding amplified by El Niño episodes. We show how different tools and methods can be co-generated and used at different learningLearning stages and across temporal and agency scales by researchers and practitioners. Seamless integration is neither possible, nor desirable, and in many instances, an adaptive managementAdaptive management approach through, what we call, a Shared Resilience Resilience Learning Learning Dialogue, can provide the boundary process that connects the different analytical elements developed and particularly links those up with community-led processes. Our critical examination of the experience from the Alliance leads into suggestions for identifying novel funding and support models involving NGOs, researchers and the private sector working side by side with public sector institutions to deliver community level support for managing risks that may go “beyond adaptationAdaptation .”

Source: Climate risk management, policy and governance

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-72026-5_17