R2R launches consultation to strengthen resilience metrics framework

In January 2021 the Race to Resilience launched a Metrics Framework for non-State actors to verify the climate resilience impact of their actions. For the first time, the Framework allowed non-State actors to report action, and quantify and verify impacts under a common framework.

To build on this work, and help strengthen it, the Climate Champions Team with support of the UNFCCC, will today open a public consultation to receive inputs from practitioners and researchers from a broad spectrum of organizations. Inputs are being sought to strengthen any element of the Framework with the priority of improving and including metrics that help measure, by varying adaption actions, increased resilience of people.

The scope of Race to Resilience includes people and hectares of natural systems, with a goal of covering gaps in resilience. This implies that for the campaign to be successful, it has to include the most exposed, vulnerable, populous and large regions of the Global South. In contrast, a scope including assets would have the opposite effect.

The focus is on increased resilience. The campaign does not claim that the people and ecosystems benefitting from partner actions are resilient or adapted to climate change, rather the claim is that they have increased resilience to climate change. This is a journey where all and every action matters and adds up to the goal of making 4 billion people more resilient by 2030.

The R2R campaign includes two workstreams, on Metrics and on Transformations. In 2021, 25 partner initiatives joined the Metrics workstream. Of these, 17 were in a position to make their pledges for COP26, 14 of which had pledges on the number of individuals with increased resilience to at least one climate hazard by 2030, for an aggregated total number of 2.3 billion people.

Some examples of pledges received in 2021

• Deduplicated data showed pledges in at least 127 countries, with a few countries with presence in up to seven partners (such as Perú), and most initiatives pledging to duplicate their territorial coverage by 2030.
• There were reasons to be optimistic, because partial pledges showed averages, per partner, of 38 countries (11 partners), 44 subnational regions (6 partners), and 90 cities (seven partners).
• Seven initiatives made pledges to act in a total of 629 cities, and five initiatives in 236 companies.
• Three initiatives were in a position to make pledges regarding natural systems, for a total of at least 102, two of them specifying hectare coverage for a total of 46 million ha.

Future plans

Partner initiatives are committed to reporting every year in two main areas:

• Refining, scaling, and maybe even expanding their pledges up to 2030.
• Reporting on all validated outcomes for the given year, which, ideally, implies specifying the number of people and hectares made more resilient in a particular location (country, Admin 1 sub-regional level, city, company or natural system) to specific climate hazards, including the type of climate action.

These metrics will then be compiled and aggregated by CR2, as well as contrasted with Risk Analytics data on exposure. This for three reasons:

1. As a mechanism for transparency and tracking of the campaign.
2. To make sure any potential instance of double counting is properly taken into consideration and deduplicated in the aggregate.
3. To keep track of resilience gaps and resilience convergence at a granular level across the globe, on the basis of contrasting pledges and outcomes to hard data on exposure to climate hazards.

To read more about the consultation process, click here.

To find out more about the Framework, click here

To submit your input click here

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