Editor’s Pick: Infrastructure for Resilience Tools and Resources on Climatelinks

Strong, resilient infrastructure can help countries better prepare for climate variability and change, such as more severe and frequent weather events or sea level rise. Basic infrastructure is failing, insufficient, or non-existent in many developing countries, and changes in climate can damage infrastructure across sectors from energy, health, education, and others.

USAID is supporting improved urban services to help cities and countries achieve climate-resilient, low-emission, sustainable economic development as outlined in its urban policy, Sustainable Service Delivery in an Increasingly Urbanized World. Over the years, USAID has partnered with local governments to support energy efficiency, improve urban planning, enable access to climate information and unlock financing. For example, the Climate Resilient Infrastructure Services (CRIS) program was an initiative under the Washington D.C.-managed Climate Change and Resilient Development (CCRD) activity. This program worked with USAID missions and cities in developing countries to increase the climate resilience of physical infrastructure and the services that it provides. To learn more about the work undertaken by CCRD, visit the legacy project mini-site.

USAID currently has several programs that support climate-smart cities by helping them increase their capacity to finance and build public infrastructure and services to address these challenges. These include:

• Adaptasi Perubahan Iklim dan Ketangguhan (Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience) (APIK) Project supports the Government of Indonesia in improving climate and disaster resilience at the national and local levels. The project targets support to those most susceptible, such as urban slum inhabitants living at the rising water’s edge.
• Strengthening Urban Resilience for Growth with Equity (SURGE) is the flagship project of USAID’s Cities Development Initiative (CDI), a crucial component of the broader Partnership for Growth (PFG). Under the PFG, the Philippines and the United States are working to accelerate and sustain broad-based and inclusive economic growth.
• The USAID-National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Partnership supports the development of clean, reliable, and affordable power and assists with policy, planning, and deployment support for advanced energy technologies. Take a look at the new USAID-NREL Partnership mini-site where you can find more resources related to energy and infrastructure resilience in the developing country context.

A selection of ongoing activities, as well as blogs, resources, and tools, can be found below.

Blogs:

• Powering energy, women’s empowerment, and social benefits in El Salvador’s geothermal sector takes a look at how a geothermal energy company in El Salvador, LaGeo, invests in women and girls for inclusive green growth.
• The Infrastructure Upgrade, Reimagined highlights a cross-sector initiative in Peru to expand a new vision of water infrastructure that includes natural ecosystems, ancestral approaches, and people.
• Progress Toward Financing Urban Infrastructure – An Update on the C40 Cities Finance Facility captures USAID’s partnership with the C40 Cities Finance Facility to identify available financing to implement low-carbon and climate-resilient infrastructure projects.

Resources:

• The Power Sector Resilience Planning Guidebook can be used by policymakers, power sector investors, planners, system operators, and other energy-sector stakeholders to facilitate discussions and complete key steps of a power-sector resilience planning process.
• The Resilient Energy Platform fact sheet series includes quick reads on cutting edge technical topics related to power-sector resilience. They each tackle an individual topic and piece together a holistic approach to power-sector resilience planning.
• Climate Resilient Infrastructure Services (CRIS): Increasing Climate Resilience of Infrastructure in Developing Countries explains the CRIS program, which worked with cities in developing countries and USAID missions to make key infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
• A practical pathway for climate resilient infrastructure: removing barriers to design, finance, and construction captures takeaways from the ATLAS Project’s September 2018 Adaptation Community Meeting. This includes the challenges and solutions for promoting smarter decisions about how to design, finance, and build infrastructure.

Tools:

• The Resilient Energy Platform supports the development of resilient, sustainable, and secure power systems with expertly curated resources, training materials, data, tools, and direct technical assistance.