Making Cities Resilient Report 2019: A snapshot of how local governments progress in reducing disaster risks in alignment with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

During 2017-2018, 214 cities/municipalities from Asia (88), the Americas (50), Sub-Saharan Africa (50), and Arab States (26) conducted the preliminary level assessment of the Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities, as part of the initiative, “Making Cities Sustainable and Resilient: Implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 at the Local Level”, supported by the European Commission. This report articulates the results of these preliminary Scorecard assessments into an analysis of the global trends of resilience actions, reflecting the progress in resilience building at the local level.

This analysis is an attempt to identify key challenges, opportunities, and recommendations for urban resilience, taking into consideration the elements within the Ten Essentials of the Making Cities Resilient Campaign including the aspects on local governance, financial and technical resources, policies and plans, and participation and engagement of citizens. Multiple descriptive statistical techniques were used to analyse the ordinal data. Content analysis, a form of thematic analysis, was used to identify key challenges, opportunities, and recommendations, based on the comments given by the respondents.

The results of this study reveal the state of being of local governments on disaster risk reduction, which permits an enhanced understanding of the progress towards achieving the targets of the Sendai Framework at the local level. This simultaneously reflects the progress made towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 11, “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”, which cannot be achieved without a substantive reduction of potential impact caused by disasters to population, society and economy.