Experience Sharing Workshop: Making Cities Sustainable and Resilient in Mongolia

Background

Cities are hubs for ideas, commerce, culture, science, productivity, social development and much more. At their best, cities have enabled people to advance socially and economically. Yet now that half of the world’s population live in cities, making sustainable and resilient cities - amidst a changing climate, rapidly depleting resources, and unplanned urbanization - is one of our greatest challenges and opportunities.

Current and future challenges of mainstreaming climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction in development planning demand new approaches, mechanisms, sets of skills and competencies that need to be identified and strengthened in order to form the basis of increasing public demand and political commitment to local actions and budget allocations.

To support the local governments in reducing risk, addressing sustainable development challenges, and to achieve target ‘e’ of the Sendai Framework and indicator 11b of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and the European Commission have engaged in a three-year initiative “Making cities sustainable and resilient: implementing the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 at the local level”.  Under this initiative, UNISDR and its partners have been working with 20 high risk cities globally to strengthen capacities to develop and facilitate the implementation of disaster risk reduction and resilience plans. 200 other Making Cities Resilient members are working towards establishing their baselines using the Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities.

UNISDR in collaboration with NEMA and the United Nations in Mongolia worked together to engage cities in the Making Cities Resilient Campaign, starting in 2016, where three major cities joined the Campaign: Ulaanbaatar, Darkhan and Erdenet. It was followed by the first training on the Implementation of the Sendai Framework at the local level for Eastern and Govi provinces hosted by Dalanzadgad.  In 2017, a series of trainings took place in Darkhan, Ulaanbaatar and Bulgan reaching out to Northern, Southern and Central provinces.

The capacity development workshops not only provided fundamental knowledge on disaster risk reduction and sustainable development, but also helped equip city officials with tools in self-assessing the disaster resilience building progress and developing DRR and resilience action plans. As result, in January 2018 all Cities in Mongolia joined the Making Cities Resilient Campaign. In April 2018, Ulaanbaatar City conducted the Disaster Resilient Scorecard with all its 9 districts and in August 2018, Ulaanbaatar City developed its local disaster risk reduction plan. More recently, the Western provinces get together in Ulaangom to attend the training on MCR Campaign tools.  

Workshop Objectives and Expected Outcomes

Overall, the workshop is expected that cities in Mongolia shares their results in applying the Making Cities Resilient Campaign tools and approaches to build local resilience to disasters.

The workshop aims to:

• Identify what are the key challenges and capacities needs to overcome the issues identified.
• Peer learning on development disaster risk reduction plans
• exchange experiences and build connections towards city-to-city collaboration in resilience building among participating cities, partners and stakeholders.

Expected Outcomes:

• Cities in Mongolia have shared their results of the Disaster Resilience Scorecard and actions towards addressing the gaps encountered
• Cities in Mongolia enhanced understanding and equipped with tools for developing local DRR plans
• Network among Mongolia cities, partners and stakeholder strengthened to complement the development and implementation of DRR and resilience action plans