Resilient Planet Initiative

The impacts of climate change are already widely apparent and are particularly devastating for an estimated four billion people living in the global south of whom an estimated 1 billion live in informal settlements. To mitigate the escalating climate crisis, the world must reduce GHG emissions as rapidly as possible to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees, while also empowering those most affected to adapt to this changing reality.

Adaptation requires access to comprehensive and actionable information about climate risks and solutions to build climate resilience. Climate impact data and information on adaptation measures is siloed, fragmented, inconsistent, incomplete, and not universally accessible. This leads to redundancy in some areas while leaving gaps in others, as not all adaptation actors are focused on shared learning.

Resilient Planet Initiative (RPI), is aimed at empowering vulnerable communities, particularly women in informal settlements in Eastern Africa, to adapt to the growing challenges of climate change. RPI addresses the critical need for accessible, comprehensive, and actionable information on climate risks and adaptation strategies through three interconnected digital platforms:

Data Hub: Centralises global data on climate risks, making it open and accessible.
Solutions Hub: Showcases best practices and actions taken by communities, businesses, and cities to enhance climate resilience.
Exchange Hub: Develops user-friendly apps to provide tailored climate risk information and solutions, empowering local communities to build resilience.

The initial focus of RPI will be the development of the Exchange Hub app, which will bring data from the Data Hub on climate risks and adaptation interventions from the Solutions Hub women leaders living in informal settlements in Eastern Africa. The app will enable these leaders to access: climate risk information, best adaptation interventions from other users, and share their own solutions and experiences, fostering a collaborative approach to resilience building.

The Resilient Planet Initiative  aims to develop and exchange a comprehensive set of globally consistent impact data and solutions information to help decision-makers in local communities, businesses, cities, investors, and national and international roles plan and take action to adapt to climate change, and share their experiences and lessons learned.

Six key partners collaborating on RPI:

Global Resilience Partnership (GRP): Project management and technical leadership.
Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC): Linkages to Roof Over Our Head labs in informal settlements.
Slums Dwellers International (SDI): Ensures the app meets the needs of women leaders in East and Southern Africa.
Ona: Software architecture design for data access and sharing functionalities.
Oxford University (OU): Provides climate risk data and supports adaptation taxonomy and finance access.
CR2, University of Chile:Develops APIs for global climate data access and taxonomy integration.
Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI):Oversees taxonomy integration for resilience solutions.

This initiative will contribute to the Race to Resilience campaign, aiming to make 4 billion people more resilient to climate impacts by 2030.