The regions and countries in the Global South, e.g. Sab-Saharan Africa experience rapid population growth, with accumulation of urban risks, with high level of vulnerability to climate hazards, disasters, and climate change. Furthermore, coastal cities and communities are highly exposed to storms and sea level rise. Urban resilience is a systemic approach able to tackle major global challenges but there are various challenges of operationalizing the concept. Current approaches pose limits for replications in other contexts and are diagnosis tools rather than assisting to determine strategies with actions for achieving resilience.
Local government, e.g. in Sab-Saharan Africa have limited technical, financial and institutional capacities, for climate adaptions and resilience building urban resilience. There is a need to understand and strengthen the capacity building processes for climate actions and building urban resilience. Likewise, resilience monitoring and evaluation approaches developed by practice and academia are so far limited. The City Resilience Action Planning Tool (CityRAP) is a planning tool developed by UH-Habitat and it aims at enabling municipalities to plan and prioritize actions for building resilience in Sub Saharan African cities.
The aim of the research project is to foster the operationalisation of urban resilience, through assessing and strengthening capacity building for actions; enhancing impact and sustainability of resilience and climate interventions, as well as assess and strengthening tools and methods that support actions for the resilience transition of urban coastal areas in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The general objective of the research project is to further improve capacity building of local governments by investigating current programmes for capacity building, primarily CityRAP and assessing its impact, potential for replication and upscaling for operationalising of urban resilience transition in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The PhD is in collaboration with United Nations Human Settlements Program UN-Habitat