Making a million people climate-proof

Climate proof disaster risk reduction programme aims to increase the relience of poor communities to impacts of natural hazards, climate change and ecosystem degradation. Credits: Cordaid

Climate proof disaster risk reduction programme aims to increase the relience of poor communities to impacts of natural hazards, climate change and ecosystem degradation.
Credits: Cordaid

By Sasja Kamil, Cordaid (Caritas Netherlands) 

Poor communities are by far the most vulnerable to the impacts of natural hazards, climate change and ecosystem degradation. It damages their livelihoods and erodes their resilience. Supporting them requires teamwork.

For Cordaid, this collaboration came in the form of the Partners for Resilience – an alliance consisting of five organisations: Cordaid, the Netherlands Red Cross, CARE Nederland, Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre and Wetlands International. They have jointly formulated a 5-year programme in an attempt to climate-proof disaster risk reduction.

Objectives:

  • Increase the resilience of communities to disasters, climate change and environmental degradation;
  • Increase the capacity of civil society organizations (CSOs) to apply disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate-change adaptation (CCA) and ecosystem management and restoration (EMR) measures and conduct policy dialogue;
  • Make the institutional environment – from international to grass-root level – more conducive to integrating disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and ecosystem-based approaches.

The Partners for Resilience aim to achieve this goal by integrating three approaches: disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation (CCA), and ecosystem management and restoration (EMR).

Sharing innovations with stakeholders at different levels is an essential feature of the programme – ‘from local to global and back’. The programme builds upon the wealth of existing global partnerships within the alliance members, as well as partnerships with knowledge institutions and the private sector.

If successful, it is estimated that this programme will reduce the impact of natural hazards on the livelihoods of 1,000,000 vulnerable community members, both in rural and urban slum communities.

The programme will be implemented in nine countries: Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mali, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Uganda. The proposal has been submitted to the Netherlands government for co-financing (70 million Euros for 5 years) and hopes to get started by 1st of January 2011.

Donate


Please give to Caritas generously. Your support makes our work possible.

Pray

Caritas brought together a collection of prayers and reflections for you to use.

Volunteer


Volunteers make a crucial contribution. Find out how you can be one.