Cities from Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia have initiated efforts to adopt holistic strategies for disaster risk reduction at local level, following resilience assessments carried out with UNDRR support.
City representatives ran assessments across a set of 10 essential dimensions for local level resilience building looking at city governance, integrated and response planning, using UNDRR’s Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities. Covering 47 indicators, the Scorecard responds to key Sendai Framework targets and indicators (link here).
As a result, a set of recommended “actions to achieve maximum resilience” have been synchronized with planned actions for each cities’ local DRR strategy. The assessment process has provided significant points of attention, such as specific analysis of risk factors to be included in the local disaster risk assessment (e.g. cascading of critical infrastructure, vulnerable groups and gaps in response assets), more emphasis on risk reduction in urban planning, and more attention for risk reduction through the use of natural assets.
The following examples highlight the assessment experiences across four of the cities:
Gabrovo, Bulgaria
Gabrovo has to deal with a very specific geographic situation. Situated between two different valleys of a mountainous area with an extremely stretched out urban zone, the city and its critical infrastructures are exposed over a long and narrow area to flash floods, landslides, forest fires and heavy snowfall. Gabrovo has a permanently appointed secretary that coordinates its DRR efforts, and as it begins to undertake the process of developing a DRR strategy, it is in a position to build on the existing national and regional DRR strategies. The budget available for DRR is mainly geared toward response and recovery activities, but a key competent of the scorecard exercise was identifying ways to invest in prevention and building resilience. The stakeholder session saw great enthusiasm in Gabrovo to move forward in this direction. Gabrovo has participated in a DRR related EU project in the past and is actively looking for opportunities to improve resilience through new international cooperation projects.