Regional Training Workshop on Building Cities Resilience to Climate and Disaster Risks

February 24-28, 2020

Current and future challenges of mainstreaming climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction into national and local development planning demand new approaches, mechanisms, sets of skills and competencies that need to be identified and strengthened in order to form the basis of increasing public demand and political commitment to local actions and budget allocations. Lack of appropriate knowledge on the subject, lack of government commitment and the absence of mainstreaming in current organizational and government strategy and plans are key existing challenges. This training workshop is designed with an aim to assist city governments in building greater resilience to climate and disaster risks through integrating climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction into wider city development plans and strategies.

In this regard, building resilience and adapting to climate change is crucial for cities. Efforts to build resilience in cities can benefit from integrating disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation with existing efforts in disaster risk reduction and other similar planning processes.

The Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities Network (EPIC-N) systematically matches city and local government needs with the innovation of students and academics to address a broad spectrum of sustainability, resiliency, and related community quality of life issues, with lasting and sustainable impacts for all involved. The EPIC Model is unique in that it leverages the vastly underutilized resource of existing university courses to apply tens of thousands of hours of fresh thinking, insight, and analyses to help local governments improve and accelerate their capacity to meet important local environmental, social, and economic challenges. Colleges and universities paired with local governments can be a powerful force in making cities resilient and sustainable, connecting students and faculty to real-world projects that address the pressing needs of local municipalities and communities as they contend with the challenges of becoming more sustainable and resilient and adapting to climate change.

Workshop Objectives

This capacity building workshop, while promoting the importance of effective climate change adaptation and disaster
risk reduction, will provide:

• an opportunity for cities and local governments to enhance capacities of different stakeholders for developing and implementing city resilience action plans;
• a platform for in-depth learning, knowledge sharing and exchange of good practices among participants;
• a space for city-to-city and multi-stakeholder cooperation for building resilience in cities by integrating climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction principles into cities wider development strategies, policies, plans and programmes.

Workshop Participation

The training programme will be limited to four cities and teams of 3-4 participants from each city. Each country will also be represented by 3-4 National/local University Professors and administrators selected by the EPIC-Network from each of 4 selected cities/countries. To the extent possible, city teams may include stakeholders from different sectors (authorities and experts from National and local/city governments agencies, national universities and climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction training institutions, civil society organizations, and climate change and DRR experts) aiming to ensure that the voices and needs of different populations are considered during group sessions, foster collective effort, and strengthen the knowledge and capacities of different stakeholders so that they all can positively contribute towards risk reduction.

This course is organized by the Regional Resource Centre for Asia and the Pacific at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in collaboration with the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction and the EPIC-Network with financial support from the Ministry of the Environment of Japan.

Event Attendance

The event will be hosted at the Sukosol Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. The event has a capped participant capacity to insure attendees receive a quality experience. To inquire about attending the event, please use the contact information below.

Contact

Event Details

Marc Schlossberg
President, Board of Directors
EPIC-Network
mschlossberg@epicn.org

Other EPIC-Network Questions

Marshall Curry
Program Manager
EPIC-Network
mcurry@epicn.org