The Urban Resilience Enhancers are extracted from UN-Habitat’s leading urban resilience tool, the City Resilience Profiling Tool.
Each Urban Resilience Enhancer focuses on a key or cross-cutting theme that is critical for cities to consider when increasing their safety for citizens and working towards sustainable urban development. The Enhancers assist the users (principally local governments) to initiate or advance advocacy, analysis and training activities on resilience. To date, the series covers Climate Action, Gender Equality, Upgrading from Informality, Social Resilience, Resource Efficiency, Human Rights and Infrastructure.
Each Enhancer follows the same structure, firstly explaining the connection between the issue in question, urban resilience and urban development, then providing practical indicators that city governments can apply. Like the CRPT, the Enhancers follow a people-centered approach and can be used to initiate discussion and create a snapshot of the city’s strengths and vulnerabilities.
Climate Action: The impacts of climate change are impacting on people’s wellbeing and livelihoods across the world. As the principle emitters of emissions, cities must be at the centre of climate action. This Enhancer helps identify trends, vulnerabilities, and synergies within an urban system, providing a basis on which to initiate climate action.
Gender equality: Women and men, girls and boys, each experience urbanisation and benefit from its opportunities differently according to their gender identities. This Enhancer helps gather relevant information on the relationship between gender, human development, and city resilience, in order to mainstream gender equality in cities.
Upgrading from informality: More than one quarter of the world’s urban population lives in informal settlements. Informal settlements create marginalisation and segregation, and their inhabitants are often more vulnerable to health risks, natural disasters, and a lack of basic services. This Enhancer outlines a series of indicators to help local governments evaluate informality in their city.
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Social resilience: Social resilience encompasses a variety of topics, from citizen wellbeing to the delivery of services. This Enhancer has three angles of analysis: understanding vulnerability from a social perspective, considering all vulnerabilities in relation to human rights; assessing the availability of services in response to people’s needs; and formulating actions for resilience that adapt to local needs and can be implemented by local stakeholders.
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Resource efficiency: The consumption of natural resources has increased to unsustainable levels due to poor management, population growth and rapid urbanisation, with cities now using billions of tonnes of raw materials to sustain their urban lifestyles. The concept of resource efficiency, outlined in this Enhancer, offers the opportunity to promote responsible use of resources while maintaining a good standard of living.
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Human rights: The human rights-based approach elaborated in this Enhancer helps identify a pattern of human rights fulfilment between individuals (the rights-holders) and the state, whose duty it is to protect their rights. According to this Enhancer, non-discrimination, participation, accountability, and the rule of law must be central principles of resilient urbanisation.
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