Last week the UN-Habitat’s Barcelona office received a delegation from Yakutsk City Council with the objective of reinforcing the ongoing collaboration between the City Resilience Profiling Programme and the far east Russian city.

As highlighted by the Mayor of Yakutsk during a recent interview (link), building resilience in the city is essential as it faces a number of unique challenges, firstly being built on permafrost and secondly due to extreme summer and winter temperatures, both of which can place people and city functionality at risk. As part of the resilience efforts, representatives of the local government travelled to Barcelona to attend a workshop training on their implementation of UN-Habitat’s primary resilience tool – the City Resilience Profiling Tool (CRPT) – in their city.

During the week, several workshops were held to gather inputs from both UN-Habitat and the Yakutsk delegation and discuss the most pertinent resilience topics related to CRPT implementation, including: UN-Habitat’s supportive role, communications strategy, definition of a workplan and next steps, and good practices from partner cities implementing under the Making Cities Sustainable and Resilience EC funded action. Specific components of the CRPT such as gender, economy or ecology were also reviewed in greater detail with full training provided.

Summarizing the week, Gavril Kirillin, Yakutsk’ Head of International Relations, expressed, “Yakutsk City as a partner of UN-Habitat is supporting the implementation of a New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals on municipal level in the Russian Federation. The main goals of our attendance at the Workshop in Barcelona were to check the clock with focal points to validate a new working plan for Yakutsk and learn new updates on the tool to launch the Resilience Action Plan for Yakutsk. We believe it will help us to make people’s life easier and more comfortable in our city and region, to respond better on issues of urban environment and social and economic development.”

This workshop is the latest milestone in the implementation of the CRPT in Yakutsk, which will continue over the coming two years. Efforts to address the unique resilience challenges faced in Yakutsk are a testimony to the commitment of local-level actors and one that stands to be shared during the upcoming Barcelona Resilience Days.