Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network

The Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) aims to catalyze attention, funding, and action on building climate change resilience for poor and vulnerable people by creating robust models and methodologies for assessing and addressing risk through active engagement and analysis of various cities. ACCCRN is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and focuses on three work areas:
1) experimenting with and testing local approaches to building climate change resilience for institutions and systems serving poor and vulnerable communities;
2) promoting, demonstrating, and disseminating knowledge about these and other viable approaches; and
3) increasing awareness among funders, practitioners, policy makers and business on the need to invest in building climate resilience.

Currently, ACCCRN works in ten cities in India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, experimenting with a range of activities that collectively will improve the ability of the cities to withstand, to prepare for, and to recover from the projected impacts of climate change and climate variability. The approaches taken are determined by the local needs and priorities of each city.

Through engagement in the ACCCRN cities, and with various partners throughout the region, the Rockefeller Foundation seeks to support a promising collection of urban climate change resilience interventions that will address a range of climate impacts and vulnerability contexts, scales, and geographies.

The ultimate goal of ACCCRN is to provide poor and vulnerable people the ability to respond in an appropriate way to existing and future climate risks. As a result:

• People are able to problem solve and are willing to invest time, energy and resources and be entrepreneurial
• People will have more choices – they will feel more secure and less vulnerable
• Lives are improved because people feel more secure and less vulnerable in the face of disasters

In order to achieve this, the program partners have developed a diverse range of effective approaches, processes, and practices to build urban climate change resilience that incorporates the priorities of poor and vulnerable communities in ACCCRN cities. Through ACCCRN, dissemination and sharing of models and best practices will generate further action by a greater number of institutions and communities within the ACCCRN cities and within new geographies.

ACCCRN seeks to assemble a portfolio that includes individual or linked interventions that:
• Span, preferably, all four ACCCRN countries and are located in several cities
• Grow out of and are initiated by different types of institutions, including government entities, non-governmental organizations, private sector firms, and community based organizations
• Employ a diversity of approaches such as capacity building, policy development, infrastructure developments and financial interventions
• Garner a spectrum of types of support from Rockefeller Foundation, including costs for pre-feasibility or feasibility studies, direct funding, co-finance, resource brokering, and assistance in the marketing of proposals
• Demonstrate diversity in size and scope, financially and in timelines for implementation
• Maintain relevance across a range of sectors impacted by climate change
• Target a variety of climate risks, including direct and indirect impacts as well as impacts that relate to current and future risks
• Address a range of vulnerabilities and vulnerable groups
• Affect different urban scales, from community level, to sector level, to city-wide
• Use evidenced based interventions based on deep understanding of urban climate poverty vulnerabilities
• Show clear multi-stakeholder and multi-sector support
• Prove from the outset that they are cost effective, technically, legally and financially viable

An additional objective of ACCCRN is to expand and deepen the base of urban climate change resilience work to achieve greater scale. The focus for this expansion is both within the ten ACCCRN cities and to new geographies through additional financial and technical support, and through policies that enable urban climate change resilience.

ACCCRN is being implemented by a wide range of partner organisations who work closely with the cities. Our partners include NGOs, research and academic institutions and private sector organisations.

ACCCRN focuses on building resilience of cities to climate change impacts, including climate related disasters. Through this program, cities will have greater capacity to undertake climate change resilience planning and implement resilience building actions, including a focus on climate change response and disaster mitigation and response.