The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable human settlements development and the achievement of adequate shelter for all. For over forty-five years UN-Habitat has been working in human settlements throughout the world, focusing on building a brighter future for cities and towns of all sizes. One of the four focus area under the new Strategic Plan 2020-2023 is Strengthened Climate Action and Improved Urban Environment.
UN-Habitat’s Global Solutions Division (GSD) is overseeing the Agency’s operational work as well as the institutional and programmatic relationship with climate and biodiversity initiatives, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
The Global Solutions Division is responsible for providing programmatic direction to UN-Habitat and accountable for the programmatic delivery of its Strategic Plan. The division leads tools and methodology production and the integration of substantive competencies towards effective delivery.
Within GSD, the Programme Development Branch (PDB) is responsible for the overall coordination of programme development. It brings together normative and operational expertise supporting high-quality integrated programmes that maximize results across the outcomes and the domains of change in UN-Habitat’s Strategic Plan, of which one is Strengthened climate action and improved urban environment. The Domain of Change focuses on three outcomes:
Delivery of the three outcomes under the Domain of Change to strengthen climate action and improve the urban environment is supported by UN-Habitat’s flagship programme on Resilient Settlements for the Urban Poor – RISE UP. This flagship programme is aimed at increasing the resilience and socio-economic prosperity of urban poor communities in the Global South by 2030.
It will achieve this by reducing climate change risk-related disruption to livelihoods and improving basic service provision for a significant proportion of the more than 3.3 – 3.6 billion people living in vulnerable climate hotspots and the more than one billion urban dwellers who live in informal settlements today.
Background to Consultancy
Cities in Bolivia, Colombia, Ethiopia, Jordan and Tunisia are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Rising global temperatures are causing sea levels to rise and increasing the number, frequency and severity of extreme weather events, exposing urban populations to climate related hazards such as floods, droughts and storms.
These trends have costly impacts on cities’ basic services, infrastructure, housing, livelihoods, health, biodiversity and ecosystems. Such adverse impacts are most pronounced for marginalized, urban poor communities where people live without basic access to services, shelter, security, and infrastructure.
Across the five countries there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of the nexus of vulnerability between climate change, urbanization, and biodiversity at municipal and local levels. These interrelated dimensions are often addressed in silos in both policy and praxis.
There is a critical need to enhance the capacities of municipal and local governments to better understand multidimensional vulnerabilities and to better plan, design and implement evidence-based urban climate adaptation actions.
The project called Accelerating the Implementation of the Paris Agreement by Building the Climate Resilience of the Urban Poor in Bolivia, Colombia, Ethiopia, Jordan, and Tunisia aims to enhance understanding of multilayered and interconnected climate, urban, spatial, socio-economic and biodiversity risks and vulnerabilities of the most vulnerable communities in secondary and tertiary cities.
Through a rigorous, spatial vulnerability assessment methodology, the project identifies hotspots of multilayered
vulnerabilities. These hotspots will help to identify climate resilience and adaptation actions at municipal and local levels with the greatest benefit for the most vulnerable urban poor.
It further aids to appraise and prioritize feasible and bankable pipeline projects that reduce vulnerabilities in hotspots through participatory urban planning and decision-making processes with local stakeholders and urban poor communities.
A bottom-up approach to climate resilient development and inclusive urban resilient planning will be applied, in alignment with the global RISE UP programme approach. As a result, urban climate action in project cities will be accelerated through a multilevel governance approach. The project will voice the adaptation needs of the most vulnerable and redirect large-scale finance for urban adaptation.
Objectives
Building on the efforts of establishing a RISE UP Secretariat, the overall objective of the project is to build the capacity towards climate resilience of urban poor communities in Bolivia, Colombia, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and Jordan, achieving global climate and development goals. Long-term, the project will support the integration of urban climate issues into NDCs, NAPs and municipal and national climate policy as well as investment planning.
The project will be divided in two phases, which outcomes are: