Integrating Climate Actions into Local Development Plans: Enhancement of Cities Climate Resilience

June 2020 | JAKARTA – Incorporating climate actions into development plans is essential. It helps ensure that hard-won development gains are not undermined and that future development interventions are resilient in the face of a changing climate. Being the Secretariat of Global Covenant of Mayors’ (GCoM) for Southeast Asia sub-region, UCLG ASPAC complies with GCoM Common Reporting Framework that requires a city to create Climate to Action Plan (CAP). UCLG ASPAC IUC Asia Team assists cities throughout the process; from developing the GHG inventory, assessing climate risks and vulnerability, defining mitigation targets and adaptation goals, to creating climate action plan. A virtual capacity-building session was organised for Makassar and Palembang (two GCoM’s pilot cities) on 11 and 18 June respectively, discussing “Adaptation Planning Based on Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (CRVA)” was conducted as part of its implementation process. The activity was supported by IUC Asia Technical Partner, CCROM SEAP-IPB.

In the virtual discussion session, a four-step process that cities can refer to mainstream their climate action plan into development plan was discussed:

  1. Undertake Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (CRVA). CRVA is a process to understand the climate and its changes and assess the impacts to people, areas, and sectors. CRVA enables decision makers to identify the most vulnerable areas, sectors, and community groups to make further improvement. In the context of Indonesia, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, introduces SIDIK, an online platform that enables cities to project their vulnerability level. SIDIK works by providing map showing combination of cities’ Risk, Hazard, and Exposure factors by using various data categories.
  2. Determine Priority Actions. Priority is given to development strategies and local actions that address the urban planning issues and at the same time positively contributes to climate related actions. The bigger the impact, the more it is prioritised.
  3. Bring together and analyse results of CRVA and Priority Actions to identify possible adaptation measures that addresses the 4W+1H: WHAT (the possible measures), WHERE (the geographical location), WHEN (time of implementation considering financing availability and urgency level), WHO (implementing sector), HOW (monitoring method).
  4. Improve Adaptation Measures by extending collaboration within and across sectors. At this step, city programmes and actions will be recalibrated and adjusted, further synchronised and synergised through Measurement, Reporting and Veification (MRV) efforts.

UCLG ASPAC IUC Asia Team also equipped cities with a framework to conduct quantitative calculation in determining priority actions (Step 2). In the context of Indonesia, this step requires a city to run an extensive collaborative discussion as it involves more than 20 city agencies to be able to determine the degree of contribution of each strategy, programme, and action of each sector.

The framework will help city officials to clearly classify each action based on the type of its contribution: to tackle vulnerability (vertical) or to handle development (horizontal) and based on its degree of contribution: low to high. It is the confluence of these axes (the red shade) that will help city officials to classify high (H) and very high (VH) impact actions to be prioritised and incorporated into the local development plan. The information is very useful for cities to design both short and long-term climate development strategy, that is participative, inclusive, and precisely addressing urgent climate pain points.

Participants also addressed several aspects of all-round data comprehensiveness as well as how to enhance climate risk and vulnerability assessment, including how to best set the indicators for vulnerability and adaptive capacity.

Currently, Makassar and Palembang are on the stage of discussing the priorities of their cities. It is expected that they can conclude the process within next month. UCLG ASPAC IUC Asia Team will continue assisting cities with the next step which is target setting, a closer step in the creation of Climate Action Plan (CAP).