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Making Cities Resilient – My City is Getting Ready!
Essential 2: Financing and Resources “Assign a budget for disaster risk reduction and provide incentives for homeowners, low-income families, communities, businesses and the public sector to invest in reducing the risks they face.”
Why? An action plan remains just that—a plan—unless it has dedicated resources to ensure that actions related to the Ten Essentials can be carried out. Local governments require capacities and mechanisms to access and manage resources, including for disaster risk reduction, as part of the city’s vision, mission and strategic plans. Resources can come from city revenues, national disbursements and allocations to sectoral departments, public-private partnerships and technical cooperation, and from civil society and external organisations. Chapter 3 has additional information on how to finance disaster risk reduction.
What? Invest in risk reduction measures and awareness campaigns • Integrate risk reduction measures into the local government budget to increase the resilience of the city’s economy, ecosystems and infrastructure (i.e. schools, hospitals, critical assets, water supply, drainage and solid waste management). • Along with your own funds, seek to access complementary national and provincial funds and programmes to support your actions (i.e. urban infrastructure, environmental management and public works). • Encourage public and private sector participation in developing awareness campaigns and information that promote resilience actions for the general public, home owners, education and health workers, industry, real estate developers and others.
Ensure a budget for preparedness and response • Make provisions in the budget to maintain well-trained and equipped emergency response services, communications, early warning systems and risk assessment capacities. • Institutionalize disaster management and actions, with capacity for decision making and access to funds. • Consider establishing a contingency fund for post-disaster recovery • Build a contingency fund to meet post-disaster needs with stockpiles for relief assistance, response equipment and vehicles, a reserve for post-disaster interventions and rapid recovery, and assign resources to develop toolkits and standard operating procedures for post-disaster and recovery activities.