Hub Themes
This year, nine key themes will shape the Resilience Hub’s narrative and programming. Each theme is led by a small group of leading organisations and experts across sectors and fields.
Finance and Investment
The Finance and Investment theme brings diverse actors together to discuss core issues for financing resilience, covering debt distress and climate and nature action, risk perceptions and rules for finance access, finance mechanisms and means for promoting transparency and accountability. The Resilience Hub is a space to discuss different types of climate finance and develop shared understandings of the ways risk is carried in a financing process, different ways of channelling finance (and the relationships between different actors involved throughout), and how to ensure finance is transparent and accountable both up and down the chain.Disaster Risk Management and Humanitarian Action
The humanitarian consequences of climate change are already affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world, with the world’s most marginalized and vulnerable communities impacted most severely. Climate-and weather-related disasters, like floods, landslides, storms, droughts, heatwaves and cold spells, are becoming more frequent and intense and lead to cascading social, environmental and economic impacts.
The Humanitarian Action and Disaster Risk Reduction theme will: include the perspectives of affected communities and local actors, including those already affected by crises; discuss the best practices, innovation and solutions that can be scaled up to effectively reduce risks and share information; discuss ways to scale up early warning systems and anticipatory action and investment in climate risk management and resilience building; and ensure engagement of climate, humanitarian, DRR (disaster risk reduction) and development actors/ communities to reduce silos and promote coherence and coordination.
Food and Agriculture
The pathway to a resilient agri-food system puts people and the environment at its center and requires inclusive and holistic approaches. It builds on multiple types of knowledge (for example, local, traditional, academic and official), meets the needs of the most vulnerable and fragile regions, and leads to improved access to finance and digital opportunities, innovation and scaling of nature-based solutions.
A failure or crisis in one domain such as global health or an armed conflict can increase risk in an unbounded number of interdependent domains such as our global climate, food and water supplies, energy and financial systems.
Resilient agri-food systems should support people to thrive within changing circumstances, adopt adaptive management approaches and use a precautionary principle to avoid unwanted consequences of development actions.
Water and Natural Ecosystems
Climate change impacts largely manifest through water. It is the life-giving force on earth, but has far too often been neglected in discussions outside the water sector. Climate change and human activities have profoundly altered water cycles, affecting aquatic biodiversity, needs and demands for water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), livelihoods, food production, cities and industry, and human-nature relationships. The Resilience Hub Water and Natural Ecosystems theme aims to ground water as a bedrock of societal and ecological resilience by showcasing innovative locally-led solutions, amplifying intergenerational indigenous and local voices, and matchmaking collaborations across geographies and sectors to deliver a resilient future.
Cities and Urbanization
Nearly 1 billion people – one in four urban dwellers – live in urban slums and informal settlements, making them particularly vulnerable to the consequences of climate change, such as droughts and floods. As the climate change pressure in those communities increases and the world’s cities become a refuge for many, building urban resilience requires understanding the responsibilities across sectors and stakeholders and the range of interdependencies among them. This is needed to deliver climate justice to the most affected, ensure urban equity by integrating diverse urban resilience indicators while strengthening local capacity, facilitating experience sharing, and securing finance for practical approaches to scale existing solutions, as currently only 9% of urban climate investments flow to climate change adaptation projects.
Infrastructure, Energy and Mobility
Developing resilient infrastructure that integrates the changing nature of risk, and the changing needs and demands of communities across the globe calls for looking beyond the physical condition of infrastructure to consider the quality and continuity of services, life-cycle costs including long-term operations and maintenance and loss and damage, as well as end-of-service-life considerations. A future-ready, just energy transition will reflect in infrastructure that is resilient, sustainable, and people-centered; that builds systemic resilience and tackles interconnected risks; considers nature-based solutions along with hardened structures; provides equitable access to essential services and is predominantly based on clean energy sources.
Giving a voice to communities at different stages of infrastructure development, working with nature, revising standards, and adopting certifications will play a significant role in building climate adaptation and resilience in existing and new infrastructure as well as combating the exacerbated climate impacts we are already experiencing.
Oceans and Coasts
A healthy ocean and resilient coastal communities are two sides of the same coin. Lives and livelihoods in coastal communities are dependent on a healthy ocean and thriving marine ecosystems. Coastal communities are on the frontline of climate change worldwide. Extreme weather events, sea level rise, adverse and significant ecosystem changes, pollution, overfishing, rising levels of acidity, increases in the salinity of freshwater and groundwater, all jeopardise the health of the Ocean and the people who depend on it. These systemic changes put at severe risk the social cohesion of coastal communities leading to migration and population displacement.
Arts, Culture, Antiquities, and Heritage
Culture, from art to heritage, empowers people to imagine and realize a low-carbon, just, climate resilient future. Between technological innovation and individual choice lies the communal realm, a social world of remembering, creating, sharing, and belonging that binds people to places and to each other. Through community-centred approaches, culture-based strategies strengthen resilience by supporting social networks and diverse knowledge systems and practices and linking them to place.
Health and Wellbeing
Building on the conversations at COP26 and COP27, this year the aim is to galvanise action across health, climate and urban actors, helping them create the space for collaboration and the locally applicable tools needed to accelerate and unlock the changes needed.
The Health and Wellbeing theme will take a systems approach and further illuminate the interconnectivity between human health and climate change both in terms of shared challenges but also shared solutions. It will focus on expanding the dialogue to a broader set of actors who may not be considered a part of the traditional health care system but that provide critical contributions into how we address health care in a world with a changing climate. We will explore the existing data available to inform health and climate resilience programs, the impacts of climate change on labor productivity, and health implications of plans and early warning systems within one effect of climate change, rising temperatures and extreme heat events.