Building Urban Resilience

Principles, Tools, and Practice

Building Urban Resilience in East Asia is a World Bank program that aims to increase the resilience of cities to disasters and the impacts of climate change by using a risk-based approach to making public investment decisions. The objective is to demonstrate a scalable methodology and practical tools for risk assessment that can be used for city-level investment decisions.

Working closely with the stakeholders involved in land use planning and infrastructure development, Phase I of this program identified the major challenges facing urban decision makers in terms of risks from natural disasters and climate change and now offers open-source risk assessment tools that can be used by city-level institutions, other communities, private investors, and planners of infrastructure services. Phase II explores different investment options, management plans, and capacity building needs.

Building Urban Resilience in East Asia is part of a World Bank effort to encourage governments to use risk information effectively. The Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) is intended to reduce the impact of disasters by empowering decision makers with better information and the tools to support their responsibilities. InaSAFE (the Indonesia Scenario Assessment for Emergencies) is one of those tools, developed through a partnership with the Indonesian National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB), the Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction (AIFDR), and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) Labs team.