Strengthening climate resilience in Asia Pacific

The Climate Resilient and Inclusive Cities (CRIC) is a five-year-long project funded by the European Union under their Grants for External Action. The project has been initiated by United Cities and Local Governments Asia Pacific (UCLG ASPAC) and its partners All India Institute of Local Self-Government (AIILSG), Pilot4Dev, Université Gustave Eiffel (UGE), ACR+ and ECOLISE. The project is a collaborative approach through a unique and long-lasting triangular cooperation among cities and research centres in Europe, South Asia (India, Nepal, Bangladesh), and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand). It fully meets the global objective to promote sustainable green and inclusive urban development, and to promote climate-resilient and inclusive cities. It intends to foster and strengthen partnerships among Local Authorities in accordance with the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development.
The Project aims to contribute to sustainable integrated urban development, good governance, and climate adaptation/mitigation through long-lasting partnerships, and tools such as sustainable local action plans, early warning tools, air quality, and waste management.
The CRIC Project started on 2nd January 2020 and the official kick-off meeting took place in Jakarta on 31st January. The CRIC Kick-off meeting in Jakarta was attended by a delegation from AIILSG headed by Ravi Ranjan Guru, (DDG), Devarshi Pandya (CFO), Kamlesh Pathak (Senior Technical Expert and Coordinator) and K Vishnu Mohan Rao (Cross-Sectoral Expert).
The scope of AIILSG within the CRIC project is to develop sectoral action plans for water, sanitation, air pollution, waste management, and circular economy. This is being done through tools and methodology for urban analysis. Moreover, AIILSG is and will be helping with various outreach programs.
On February 10th, 2020, at the 10th World Urban Forum, Abu Dhabi, AIILSG and UCLG ASPAC launched the United Network of Circular Cities globally. This is an initiative under the CRIC Project to create a circular economy network among the urban local bodies in Asia. This was one of the first events that took place under the CRIC project. The main aim of the program is to create polycentric and multilevel governance at the national, sub-national, and local level towards circular economy and sustainable development.
The program promotes to create multilevel partnerships with suitable enablers towards policy level action and financial mechanism trough private sector cooperation. The event promoted the concept of resources management and circular economy through exchange of resources through a network of cities.
Similarly, on 5th March 2020 at the 5th South Asian Cities Summit held in Goa, a side track was arranged under the CRIC Project and United Network of Circular Cities to promote the idea of Circular Economy and Circular Cities with the local authorities and representatives of various Asian countries. The event was successful with various important topics discussed such as sustainable procurement and supply chain management for the sustainable fashion industry in Asian countries. Another important topic was on anthropogenic activities and microplastic pollution of oceans and seas. Both these topics are highly relevant since most of the Asian countries are highly dependent on sea trades and also major manufacturing units of fashion industries are located in these countries.
On 29th April, the first Focus Group Discussion (FGD) took place for the CRIC Project. Due to COVID-19, the FGD took place on an online platform, making it e-FGD. The project team took this as an opportunity to analyse the outreach of electronic medium conference for the stakeholders which at the same time helped in reducing Green House Gas emission due to
the project.
The e-FGD was conducted with 10 pilot cities of CRIC Project in Indonesia. The discussion revealed a general support and commitment by the city, which described by request to the Project to support them in development planning process in particular for cities that will carry out the election.
This is aligned with the CRIC Project objective that expected not as stand-alone activity but rather as an activity that can be integrated with programs that already exist and future plan. The discussions also concluded that the project will also try to link with SDGs goals – since all the activity should be recorded as contribution to the goals – and facilitate financing with national and/or international finance institution due to the insufficient resources of the city to(potential) project financing and sustainability. The e-FGD was undertaken (1) to promote CRIC Project activities to pilot cities for implementation; (2) to understand CRIC Project framework and objectives; and (3) to map the modalities and availability of resources at pilot cities
Beside these activities, the CRIC Project is now gearing up for urban analysis through tools development. Several initial tools have been identified by the project team and a close evaluation and research is being conducted to develop localized and effective tools. An expert panel has been established now to advise the team and train the local authorities and stakeholders. For more information on the project please visit https://www.resilient-cities.com/