Knowing the problem
To attract investment and provide citizens with an appealing quality of life, cities need confidence that they can withstand and bounce back from a whole range of shocks and stressors. Sustainability correspondent Jill Jago describes how a new approach to understanding risks is helping Bandung, Indonesia, and other cities to plan for the future.
Bandung, Indonesia’s third largest city, has a regional population of more than nine million people, lies in a river basin and is surrounded by volcanoes. It faces an elevated risk of flooding and landslides exacerbated by poor urban development, and in early 2015 the province of West Java was on natural disaster alert. Data from the Indonesian National Disaster Mitigation Agency shows as many as 1,525 disaster events in 2014. These disasters left 566 people dead, 2.66 million others displaced, and caused damage to more than 51,000 homes and hundreds of public facilities.
Faced with these challenges, a bold vision emerged. “I have a dream for Bandung,” says the city’s Mayor Ridwan Kamil. “This is going to be a great city; a livable, lovable technopolis. It will be a thriving hub for technology businesses, manufacturing and the creative industries. But we need more than hard work and luck to achieve this.”
I have a dream for Bandung. This is going to be a great city; a livable, lovable technopolis. It will be a thriving hub for technology businesses, manufacturing and the creative industries. But we need more than hard work and luck to achieve this.
Ridwan Kamil, Mayor of Bandung
With so much at stake and so little time to achieve his vision, Mayor Kamil, who is also a well-respected architect and urban planner, embraced the United Nations’ (UN) International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) ARISE initiative as the best place to start the process of improving the city’s resilience.
UNISDR ARISE is an ambitious global initiative that aims to reduce shared risk and increase shared value through greater collaboration between the private and public sectors. It aims to make all development investment risk sensitive, and ensure that it contributes to building the resilience of local communities and the global economy as a whole. It encompasses activity streams such as Disaster Risk Management (DRM) Strategies, Risk Metrics, DRM Standards, DRM Higher Education, Responsible Investing, Resilient Cities, Insuring Resilience, DRM in the UN as well as the international “Making My City Resilient” campaign. A Biannual Global Assessment Report is also produced by UNISDR to summarize actions taken to improve resilience.
AECOM has joined UNISDR and PwC to build a broad alliance in support of the program with others, including the Economist Intelligence Unit, Willis Insurance and Principles for Responsible Investment. A partner organization, AECOM is leading one of the initiative’s work streams, focusing on supporting local business communities and government departments to increase disaster resilience in municipalities and cities.
Bandung and knowing the score
Bandung’s work began by using the Disaster Resilience Scorecard – a tool developed by AECOM and IBM in partnership with UNISDR – to gain an understanding of the risks it faced. The scorecard has proved invaluable in engaging the city’s local business communities and government departments in building a quantitative data picture of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats upon which to prioritize disaster risk reduction measures, response planning and recovery.
The highly accessible and visual quality of the information produced by the scorecard has also proved to be helpful in communicating with Bandung residents. With more than 90 percent of Bandung’s two-and-a-half-million citizens on Twitter (60 percent of the population is aged under 40), the mayor has embraced social media to engage citizens in the dialogue, create transparency in government, and quickly identify – and resolve – issues.
Leveraging its technology platform – every local government department is required to have a Twitter account and access to the new government YouTube channel – the city has been able to combine and correlate scorecard data with social media and multimedia to understand the indicators of impending incidents. For example, local planners can test available resources against need by using historical and consequence data to simulate an event (such as a bad storm or a terror threat), and then crowdsource data using social media to determine where emergency or law enforcement resources may be required. The process has helped strengthen the links between the companies impacted by natural disasters, and the public and private stakeholders who can contribute to disaster risk reduction. “Greater collaboration has been one of the key values of this initiative,” says Mayor Kamil.
Not one to rest on his laurels, the mayor is looking to the future and is very optimistic for his community. He knows there is still much work to do, but as he focuses his team on the key issues and threats identified in the process, others are starting to take notice. The mayor’s efforts have resulted in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) selecting Bandung to join the international Green City network. Within the coming five years OECD representatives will provide help on green city issues with funding support from member countries and the United Nations allowing Bandung to further improve its resilience and share best practices with other cities. Disaster risk reduction is about understanding threats, and being creative and innovative in organizing the resources to mitigate and manage risk.
Greater collaboration has been a key feature of this initiative
Mayor Kamil
ARISE to the challenge
The United Nations has been actively working to reduce the impact of natural disasters. The first World Conference on Natural Disaster Risk Reduction was held in Yokohama, Japan in 1994, followed by the second World Conference in Kobe, Japan in 2005, which produced the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015. In March 2015, representatives from 187 U.N. member states adopted the Sendai Framework, a far reaching new framework for disaster risk reduction with seven targets and four priorities for action.
UNISDR ARISE, A Private Sector Alliance for Disaster Resilient Societies, is focused on collaboration and tangible action to achieve risk-sensitive investment through a variety of initiatives. In this way, UNISDR will contribute to building the resilience of local communities and a more sustainable global economy. It will:
- Act through activity streams under the oversight of the UNISDR;
- Connect key communities with the resources and ability to influence the direction of disaster risk management (DRM);
- Deliver information, application and education to implement comprehensive DRM for business investment; and
- Move with urgency, delivering a multi-year program to achieve its ambitious goals.
The ARISE Initiative seeks to build a strong alliance that spans the globe, connects countries and allows for open exchange within and between industries and sectors.
Learn more at www.unisdr.org
68,000: lives lost to natural disaster worldwide per year (94-2013).*
44%: the increase in climate-related disasters per annum since 2000.*
$309bn: the cost of damage in the Japan tsunami.*
8,633 lives lost in the Nepal earthquake.*
$3.9bn: the cost of damage in the Nepal earthquake.*
226m: the number of people affected by disasters every year – United Nations.
680,000: the number of people who died in earthquakes between 2000 and 2010 due mainly to poorly-built buildings – United Nations.
0.7%: the percentage of total relief aid that goes to disaster risk reduction – United Nations.
* D. Guha-Sapir, R. Below, Ph. Hoyois – Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT): International Disaster Database – www.emdat.be – Université Catholique de Louvain – Brussels – Belgium.
Disaster Resilience Scorecard – an innovative approach
Recognizing that true resilience lies in social cohesion, a fresh approach to understanding risk has been developed for the United Nations by AECOM and IBM. Called the Disaster Resilience Scorecard, the tool helps cities assess and respond to the risks they face in potential natural or human disasters.
Based on the United Nations’ “Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient”, the Disaster Resilience Scorecard is the first tool to provide a single, holistic, cross-sector evaluation of any city’s ability to adapt to, respond to and recover from a disruptive event.
“The ability to withstand, quickly recover from and continue to prosper in the face of unpredictable acute shocks or natural disasters is the measure by which cities will ultimately succeed or fail in the race for global competitiveness,” says Dale Sands, AECOM’s senior vice president and global director metro & climate adaptation services, environment, and vice chair of the Private Sector Advisory Group for UNISDR. Sands spear-headed the scorecard collaboration with fellow advisory board member, IBM. “Perhaps the greatest obstacle standing in the way of a more secure, prosperous future is the yawning gap between overwhelming amounts of scientific data and metric minutiae, and the ability to translate it into meaningful, actionable information. What’s needed is the kind of data that enables cities to move forward with investment plans that are technically possible, economically feasible and politically viable. This scorecard is unique in its ability to integrate the existing data sources, and stimulate cross-sector collaboration and dialogue – the real predictor of success and security.”
Combining AECOM’s climate adaptation science and engineering data with IBM’s big data and analytics capabilities, the scorecard reviews policy and planning as well as the engineering, informational, organizational, financial, social and environmental aspects of disaster resilience.
The creation of this tool responds to the growing imperative for all cities to become resilient in the face of many types of threats. While mortality is down from disasters, capital losses are rising, largely due to increasing frequency of disasters and rapid urbanization. Responsible for about 80 percent of total investments in a city, the private sector has a significant stake in making sure cities are more resilient. The goal of the scorecard was to facilitate public-private engagement so city stakeholders can respond to disasters together, rather than individually.
The Disaster Resilience Scorecard recently received global attention when it won a Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index Prize for 2015.
Economic losses from disasters are out of control and can only be reduced in partnership with the private sector.
Ban Ki-moon United Nations Secretary-General
UNISDR ten-point checklist 10 Essentials for making cities resilient
- Put in place organization and coordination to understand and reduce disaster risk, based on participation of citizen groups and civil society. Build local alliances. Ensure that all departments understand their role in disaster risk reduction and preparedness.
- Assign a budget for disaster risk reduction and provide incentives for homeowners, low-income families, communities, businesses and the public sector to invest in reducing the risks they face.
- Maintain up-to-date data on hazards and vulnerabilities, prepare risk assessments and use these as the basis for urban development plans and decisions. Ensure that this information and the plans for your city’s resilience are readily available to the public and fully discussed with them.
- Invest in and maintain critical infrastructure that reduces risk, such as flood drainage, adjusted where needed to cope with climate change.
- Assess the safety of all schools and health facilities and upgrade these as necessary.
- Apply and enforce realistic, risk-compliant building regulations and land use planning principles. Identify safe land for low-income citizens and upgrade informal settlements, wherever feasible.
- Ensure that education programs and training on disaster risk reduction are in place in schools and local communities.
- Protect ecosystems and natural buffers to mitigate floods, storm surges and other hazards to which your city may be vulnerable. Adapt to climate change by building on good risk reduction practices.
- Install early warning systems and emergency management capacities in your city and hold regular public preparedness drills.
- After any disaster, ensure that the needs of the affected population are placed at the center of reconstruction, with support for them and their community organizations to design and help implement responses, including rebuilding homes and livelihoods.