by Liz del Castillo
Last September 5-6, 2016, Manila Observatory hosted the 5th year Final Project Meeting for Coastal Cities at Risk: Climate Impacts and Vulnerabilities at the New World Hotel in Makati City. This project was supported by the International Research Initiative on Adaptation to Climate Change (IRIACC) program of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada.
For two days, the four teams from the four coastal cities–Vancouver, Manila, Bangkok and Lagos–presented their Key Outputs and Outcomes and shared the lessons learned from the project. In the discussions, the teams shared the importance of analyzing the vertical and horizontal interactions of the dynamic layers of physical, social, economic, health and organizational sectors in understanding risk and resilience. In this project, city resilience was modeled for economic, health and organizational sectors.
This exercise showed how certain mitigating measures for flood risk can influence short and long term resilience curves which can be useful as a decision support tool. This tool can be developed further using actual world conditions. Its application can also be expanded to cover more parameters and involve more stakeholders.