Tackling climate resilience
No actor or sector alone can tackle the problem of flooding, heatwaves and other climate-related hazards.
The Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) was addressing this issue through its membership in the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, funded by the Z Zurich Foundation*. Building on a decade of flood resilience experience, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance is evolving into the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance. This strategic shift reflects the urgent need for adaptation efforts that address the escalating impact of climate change. Find out more: www.ZCRAlliance.org
The Z Zurich Foundation also has other climate change adaptation programs.
* The Z Zurich Foundation is a Swiss-based charitable foundation established by members of the Zurich Insurance Group. It is the main vehicle by which Zurich Insurance Group delivers on its global community investment strategy. All members of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, with the exception of Zurich Insurance Company Ltd, are funded by the Z Zurich Foundation.
The former Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance
Floods affect more people globally than any other type of natural hazard and cause some of the largest economic, social and humanitarian losses.
The increase in total economic losses from natural hazards is outstripping the proportion of insured losses and this protection gap continues to grow. This highlights the need to tackle natural hazards by using traditional insurance products (transferring risk) and leveraging the insurance industry’s knowledge of risk management and risk reduction. As a global insurer, Zurich can use its risk expertise to help customers and communities reduce the devastating impacts of floods - even before a flood hits - and helped build community flood resilience in a more integrated way by considering a number of approaches together, starting with ex-ante resilience building and risk reduction to better risk transfer of the residual risk. Zurich and the Z Zurich Foundation have worked on climate change adaptation since 2013, when together with other members they founded the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (“the Alliance”), a multi-sectoral partnership focused on finding practical ways to help communities strengthen their resilience to floods globally and save lives. Learn more about the Z Zurich Foundation’s work on climate change adaptation on its website.
The Alliance used to operate in more than 300 communities in some of the world’s most flood-prone areas. The communities the Alliance worked with are based on their:
- Flood risk.
- Flood vulnerability.
- Interest from both the community and local authorities to work with the Alliance.
Decisions that affect flood risk and resilience are often made at the global and national levels. Yet the impacts of floods are felt most immediately by communities. Therefore, the Alliance decided to focus on communities. The community level was an effective entry point for resilience action because communities often know best how and where to focus activities for impact. Working with communities helped demonstrate tangible impacts on peoples’ lives and develop good practices to shape policy at higher levels.
The Alliance was launched in 2013 with the goal of shifting focus from flood response and recovery to pre-event risk reduction. It consisted of humanitarian, NGO, research, and private sector partners focusing on finding practical ways to support communities in developed and developing countries to strengthen their resilience to flood risk to ensure that floods have no negative impact on people’s and businesses’ ability to thrive. Based on the successes achieved in the first five-year phase, the Z Zurich Foundation extended funding for a second five-year phase in 2018, and in 2020 support was further extended through to 2024. Originally five organizations working together, the Alliance used to comprise of nine members – Zurich Insurance Group, Concern Worldwide, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Mercy Corps, Plan International, Practical Action, the International Institute for Applied Systems and Analysis (IIASA), the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition-International (ISET).
Zurich is a signatory of the 'United for disaster resilience' statement, the insurance industry’s statement in support of disaster risk reduction. Zurich has also made a voluntary commitment to the 'Insurance industry commitments to build disaster resilience and promote sustainable development.' Zurich and the Z Zurich Foundation, alongside many other Alliance member organizations, are signatories to the Principles for Locally Led Adaptation.
How the Alliance worked
The members of the Alliance worked closely together to achieve its objectives through long-term, flexible community programs, producing new research, sharing knowledge and influencing key stakeholders on flood and climate resilience based on a commonly developed Theory of Change.
To achieve large scale impact, knowledge needs to be turned into practical solutions and used to inform large-scale programs. The Alliance brought together specialists in each of these areas with the aim of improving community resilience to flooding. This was a true collaboration. Rather than simply donating money for conducting research and implementing community programs in isolation, Zurich and the Z Zurich Foundation worked together with other Alliance members, through a set of work streams. Coordination across the work streams, akin to executive leadership teams in a business organization, helped avoid silos. Team leaders were accountable to the Alliance’s management team – senior representatives from all member organizations, similar to a board of directors.
The work streams were organized as follows:
The advocacy objective is to improve policy at global, national or sub-national level and to increase and equitably disburse funding for climate-smart, risk-informed development with a focus on pre-event flood resilience. The Alliance encourages effective public policy to include resilience-building aspects and aims to mainstream development based on risk-informed decision-making.
The Alliance shares expertise and knowledge internally across all Alliance members and externally through our external-facing activities and a dedicated portal. The portal is currently available in five languages at https://floodresilience.net/
Tools and manuals are publicly available for download, including an explanation of the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) and the Post Event Review Capability (PERC). Knowledge gained from experience of community programs helps inform advocacy messages.
The impact of flood events is felt most severely at the community level. This is where the Alliance can have a direct impact. Community programs work with flood-exposed and vulnerable communities around the world. The community programs provide the evidence of what works and why, supporting other work streams.
Measuring the impact of resilience building efforts is key for demonstrating their value for communities. The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) is the Alliance’s framework for measuring community flood resilience. As there was no framework to measure resilience, the Alliance developed its own. The FRMC has been applied in phase I and phase II program countries in a total of over 400 communities (out of which 300 communities are currently active).
To assess long-term change, the Alliance must measure outcomes and impacts and therefore long-term change, as opposed to activities and outputs.
Through the FRMC, the Alliance has developed a new approach to measuring resilience. Results have already shown positive trends in building resilience in the first phase of the program.
The Alliance has taken impact measurement to the next level and developed and applied a fully integrated measurement, evaluation, reporting and learning (MERL) framework, which focuses on reporting change across all Alliance members. This is led by Alliance member ISET International, which reports year-on-year progress and lessons learned.
Research and evidence underpin our practical efforts. Leading research organizations support the Alliance, validating its approach to flood resilience measurement (the FRMC) and how the Alliance’s work can be applied in a variety of settings, from urban-rural to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) settings, globally. They also provide the Alliance with research support in its community, knowledge and advocacy work streams.
Measuring the change that resilience building efforts have is key for demonstrating impact in communities. This is required to meet the objective – measurably enhance resilience. There was no practical toolkit that suited these needs. At the same time, there is a lack of evidence about which pre-event resilience building initiatives actually make the difference when the flood comes. In December 2013, the Alliance began to develop something suited for this purpose. For the Alliance, community flood resilience goes beyond infrastructure resilience and thus the definition of community flood resilience is:
The ability of a community to pursue its development and growth objectives, while managing its disaster risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way
The tool is a practical “hybrid” software application comprising an online web-based platform for setting up and analyzing the process, and a smartphone- or tablet-based app that can be used offline in the field for the data collection. Through the application of the FRMC in the first five-year phase in over 110 communities in nine countries collecting over 1.25 million data points, the Alliance has gone through an iteration of improving and streamlining the FRMC further. Both the framework and the tool were refined into an easy-to-use approach, to the point where the Alliance now believes it is in a position to “invite others” to use it as well; if your need for community flood resilience measurement matches that which the FRMC has to offer – why reinvent the wheel.
Learning from past flood and other natural hazard events
As part of the flood resilience program, the post-event review capability (PERC) provided research and independent reviews of large flood events. It sought to answer questions related to aspects of flood resilience, flood risk management and catastrophe intervention. It looked at what has worked well (identifying best practice) and opportunities for further improvements.
Since 2013 PERC was used to analyze various flood events. The knowledge gained was consolidated to make it available to anyone interested in progress on flood risk management. The Alliance as well as Zurich in its policy work, were also engaging in dialogue with authorities to provide them with knowledge and best practices. In addition, PERC was used to analyze wildfires as another relevant and swiftly emerging climate change hazard. See more on the PERC findings as well as the underlying, recurrent issues that PERCs have highlighted here:
