Outcome fromMidterm meeting 1- 2 October, 2015 Salford, UK

EU Project U-SCORE

Councillor Derek Antrobus • The Greater Manchester Housing and Planning Commission• Chairman of Regional Flood and Coastal Committee• Always be aware that people are at risk. Experience with a flooding event that

resulted in deaths. Mobil networks went down during the flood event which was a challenge for emergency response.

• Building materials should be improved so that the city can recover faster. • Families moved away to stay with relatives. No one knows where the 50% of the

children from the affected community are going to school now. This has an adverse effect on the community.

• Climate change adaptation projects including low carbon energy. CCA is one of the councillor’s focus points . Using tree pits to contain water during a significant rainfall event. These also take out the pollutants in the storm water.

• The people who are most at risk are the people who can not pay. We can not rely on the normal financial systems.

• Government, businesses and others from the private sector need to make their financial and technical contributions.

General comments about Scorecard

• Data collection overload was a problem. • Indicators asked about formaliaties , content, application or assessment.• Each essential could have a stairstep of indicators, beginning with indicators

asking if processes are in place and then gradually getting more advanced. Some cities in the world are at the bottom steps and other cities have come further along in resilience building and need indicators that measures this progress.

• There is a difference between the indicators in how in-depth they are. E8 and E9 cover several levels of disaster resilience. Other essentials are more superficial or have much fewer indicators.

• Indicators should point out the systems that must be in place for the city to become disaster resilient. It should be useful for contingencies planning.

• The questions should not be complicated. Nor should it be hard to understand how they should be answered.

• Choosing the scenarios is a challenge.• The Scorecard should be flexible so that it is useful for any city.

General comments about Scorecard- slide 2

• Stakeholders need to understand the rational for each indicator. • Some questions are irrelevant due to the laws and conditions applying to cities in

some countries. • How are the results affected if an indicator is not applicable to a city and is not

answered?• A positive aspect of the Scorecard is that it helps the cities take a good look at

what resilience means and how a city can enhanced their level of work in this area.

• The Scorecard is a good way to activate cities to work on all aspects of creating resilient and coordinating efforts for DRR, CCA and sustainable development.

• Should the Scorecard be adjusted to how the cities work today or should it be the other way around and cities should use the Scorecard to see what is lacking?

• The Scorecard facilitates a useful debate about if we are looking at the right things? Do we have the right things in place?

General comments about Scorecard- slide 3

• Some regions have risks that are not in the Sendai Framework, like conflicts, overpopulation and migration. The cities affected will have to address these risks when discussing resilience.

• Sharing the scores from a city’s scorecard could have consequences: political, economic, etc

• Gender aspects are missing in the Scorecard. • The scores that the city rank themselves are for the city’s use and not

intended to be used to compare with other cities. • Cities in the project want to share the action plan openly, but not the

scores or text from the Scorecard. However, it could be voluntary in case a city decides to share its answers to some or all of the indicators.

Actions Needed•Send your Powerpoint from the workshop to janet.edwards@msb.se; panda@un.org and markova@un.org on the 5th of October or as soon after that date as you can.

•Send in your suggestions for improvements for the indicators, to UNISDR within 2 weeks. Biljana at UNISDR European Office will provide a template for the cities to fill in so the cities’ comments can be submitted in a structured way that is easier to use.

•All those cities who have developed a simple tool associated with your work on the Scorecard, (and give permission to distribute it to other cities through perhaps PreventionWeb or this EU project’s web page) send your spreadsheet, table, graph, questionnaire etc. to MSB that is, anja.holmgren@msb.se and janet.edwards@msb.se or upload to project’s DropBox and let Janet know.

•UNISDR, please provide information on the 3 day training program on the City Resilience Action Plan.

Sendai Framework for DRR’s 10 essentials for Making Cities Resilient

1. Organize for disaster reliance.2. Identify, understand and use current and future risk scenarios . 3. Strengthen financial capacity for resilience.4. Pursue resilient urban development and design.5. Safeguard natural buffers to enhance the protective functions offered

by natural ecosystems.6. Strengthen institutional capacity for resilience.7. Understand and strengthen societal capacity for resilience.8. Increase infrastructure resilience.9. Ensure effective disaster response.10.Expedite recovery and build back better.

These essentials are the basis for the City Disaster Resilience Scorecard.

Essential 1 Oranise for Disaster Resilience - Arvika, Sweden

• This is part of Arvika municipality’s daily task and this is done in discussion with the city’s risk group.

• Major challenge: what is an agreement worth in time of a crisis (1.1.4)?• We are lucky enough not to have any major risk. Does this mean that we can

still use the Scorecard? • The challenge is to make a useful analysis for urban planning and decision

making.• It is important that it is relevant to improving the resilence in Arvika.• It’s a start, but the questions are too basic. To improve resilience in Arvika

we need more in-depth action. We would like questions in E1 to also be on city planning and urban design.

• Arvika has an ongoing project ”Common grounds for cooperation and leadership”.

• Arvika would like to avoid scenarios and focus on contingency planning.

Essential 1 Organise for disaster resilience – Amadora, Portugal • Understand what is Amadora’s capacity to organise for disaster resilience.• Strategy was to first translate to Portuguese. We had to adapt some of the

technical terms so that all in Amadora can understand it. Some questions where very complex.

• Organised several meeting as we usually do for the Making Cities Resilient campaign.

• The stakeholders wondered why the Scorecard is important. They had already done the LGSAT. The city said they needed their input for the indicators that are in the Scorecard.

• On-line U-Score comments from the stakeholders. • They have identified the gaps. • LGSAT – Is it a report about the state of resilience at local level?• Scorecard- Is it a dynamic platform to measure and improve disaster

relience?

Essential 1- Lisbon, Portugal

• Resilience work is important such as increased knowledge and capacity development.

• Lisbon looked at all of the indicators and assessed all the work that has been done on resilience.

• They translated all the essentials to Portuguese. • Have identified the gaps.

Essential 1-Discussion • There is a lack of information from the stakeholders for some of the indicators.

• Unsure about how they have scored each of the indicators. Would like to know the best way to score each indicator. Mayors prefer a higher score.

• Civil protection office at the municipality, tried to normalise the scores received from the stakeholders.

• AECOM says that each city has to define the score based on the information that they have received from their stakeholders. There is text in the Scorecard that explains how to score. The reason for assigning the score is as good as the number itself. Leave room for the scores to get higher, so you can reflect on the improvements made over time. There is no right or wrong answer about how to score. We started the easy way, with the information we already had.

• Guidelines will be needed on how to score the indicators if it should ever be used to compare cities with each other. ( Later is was clarified by UNISDR that it is not a tool for comparison.)

• Some of the cities can not answered some of the indicators because of the legislation in the country.

Essential 1-Discussion (continued)

• Some countries have bottom up legislation and other countries have top-down.

• It is hard to make a one-size fits all Scorecard. It is more important that resilience is increased in each city.

• Scorecard can be a self-assessment tool showing deviations from the different stakeholders in the municipality.

• The ensuing discussion in the municipality on how to improve, is the most important aspect of the Scorecard, not just the score itself.

Essential 2 Identify, understand and use current and future risk scenarios

Arvika, Sweden• The Scorecard needs to be part of their daily tasks. Arvika filled in

the LGSAT but they do not use it. • The city does risk and vulnerability analysis, dependency analysis,

contgency planning e.g.• Major challenges: 1) Choosing the scenarios. The most probable

scenario ( flood) and most severe senario (nuclear power accident) 2) How to define risk.

• The Scorecard does not improve knowledge on how to identify, understand or use risk scenarios. It should not ask if you have done an analysis but rather … are you using the analysis?

Essential 2 –Jönköping, Sweden

• City does their risk and vulnerability analysis (required by law of each municipality). The city used this as a structrue for the Scorecard.

• Most probable scenario – torrential rain; most severe scenario – ice storm

• Made a chart to show if the indicator asked about formaliaties , content, application or assessment. E2 has mostly formalities and little assessment.

• A couple of particularly important indicators and general suggestions are provided in Jönköpings ppt.

Essentials 3 Strengthen financial capacity for resilience – Stoke-on-Trent, UK

• Process: they use a systematic approach. They developed a spreadsheet with indicators on the left and each stakeholder with its own column. Marked in green which stakeholder should answer which indicators.

• Communicating with stakeholders – the questions were structured and sent to them.

• It is a challenges to use the national risk register and extract for the local level. Stoke-on-Trent does not have many natural hazards, some risk for earthquakes.

• How should metropolitan cities be assessed?• To allocate a specifc budget for DRR is unrealistic. Money is found from

different sources.• Outcome was shown as a spider web diagram showing which score each

indicator received.• Completion of essential 2 was required before essential 3 was done. • Getting info from insurance companies is different.

Essentials 4 Pursue resilient urban development and design – Stoke-on-Trent, UK

• It’s about city planning: commerical, industrial, residential, green areas etc.

• Building codes and regulations. The government monitors and enforces these. Every time there is a development project, the city can look at the risk management/ disaster resilience aspect.

• It was a straight forward essential and all questions could be answered.

• They did not learn a huge amount, but the city can verify that they are resilient in this area.

Discussion on Essential 3-4

• Difficulties having a specific budget for disaster resilience. It would not cover a large emergency anyway. Insurance plays an important role also. Unclear what is the responsbility of city governance.

• Financing is very complicated and hard to break down and describe in detail. However, AECOM looks forward to information from the local level on financing, if that info. can be obtained.

• Understanding keystone vulnerabilities in financing for building disaster resilience is an important aspect of this work.

• The amount of financing for disaster resilience differs based on the political party in office.

Essential 5 Safeguard natural buffers to enhance the protective functions offered by natural ecosystems -Salford, UK

• Challenges: some of the words in the indicators felt adversely judgemental . This makes it difficult to score. The city can easily be deficient.

• Difficult to distinguish between ”generally enforced” or ”not fully enforced”.

• An answer to indicators that resulted in a score of 5 is not always proportionate to what was accomplished.

• If we score 3 that could actually be the average of high scores in some areas and lower score in others.

• The wording was less than optimal for some indicators which means the city can not rate themselves as they actually are.

AECOM, UK (private sector)

• The cities in this project that have gone through the Scorecard have valuable comments and experiences that can be shared with other cities that are forerunners in resilience to disasters.

• AECOM would like to be involved in rewording some the questions in the Scorecard so that the Scorecard will be more useful for cities.

• A desired project result: How much do we want to leave open and how much to we want to provide guidance on? Maybe we could develop a guidance manual for the Scorecard.

• What evidence is there that if the city answers these indicators that the city will be more resilient? AECOM showed examples from other cities, of their work and their benefits. ( See AECOM’s ppt.) Cities in the project should inform AECOM of the indicators in the Scorecard that provoked such a question.

• Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities has funding for cities to work on resilience. Read New Orleans resilience document on the web site.

• More feedback is needed on the topics of data and evidence. • How do we use the findings?

AECOM, UK – slide 2• As it now, if you do not answer one of the questions in the Scorecard,

then you get a zero on that indicator and your overall score goes down.

• AECOM is working on city taxonomy.• There is no one method for using the Scorecard. No two cities do

things the same way but their experiences are indeed valuable.• AECOM appreciates all the comments from the cities in this EU

project becauses they are concrete ways to improve the Scorecard. • The European Commission’s representative sees the value in having

the comments from the cities in this EU project, funneled into the international UNISDR process to improve the indicators.

• UNISDR’s Making Cities Resilient campaign allows cities to discuss their work.

AECOM, UK – slide 3

• AECOM is interested in how the cities have experienced the indicators. It is quite different from comments from private sector or academics.

• AECOM is thinking about how to weight the essentials. • Resiliency Connect –UNISDR’s IT platform. Cities upload their

LGSAT or Scorecard so it can be shared with other cities and private sector.

Essential 6 Strengthen institutional Capacity – Amadora, Portugal

• Organized meetings with different stakeholders, about 30 organisations. The language is Portuguese. Amadora has a lot of immigrants that also need to understand the Scorecard.

• Sometimes it was hard to get info from the institutions. There are about one hundred institutions in Amadora.

• There were different scoring results in LGSAT than in Scorecard. • The local platform should be for all stakeholders so they can share

their views. • They do not have information for the neighborhoods, just for the

entire municipality.• Maybe there should be a complete database of disaster resilience

information to capture all the information. A local DRR platform could be the caretaker of this information.

Essential 6 Strengthen institutionals capacity – Lisbon, Portugal

• Lisbon is committed to being a resilient city. • They measured all the parameters for this essential. • The answers reflect a mixture of the government’s point of view and

other stakeholders points of views. • They don’t have all the tools needed to measure resilience.

National Level - UK• From Dept. for Communities and Local Government • UK has a national risk assessment - 86 threats over the country. Risks

are affected by climate change. • The local level also does risk assessments. There are tools for that.• See .ppt for matrix of risks, emergency response structure, response

to industrial action, travel disruption, ebola, intervention from the military as complete to civil protection authorities etc.

Essential 7 Understand and strengthen societal capacity for resilience – Salford, UK

• Methodology: trying to establish data sources, use of survey data etc.• Challenges: this essential is the farthest away from how they work in

Salford. • They are looking on alternative measures of community resilience.• The effectiveness of the indicator about grass roots organisations is

questionable. • The indicative measure for social cohesion is different in Scorecard

from how we think of it. • Engagement of vulnerable segments of the population. Depends on the

culture in society, about helping people out / mutual help. • Private sector employees. We have 100,000 businesses in our

jurisdiction, so it was not realistic to address this indicator.

UNISDR update

• 2700 cities in the UNISDR Making Cities Resilient campaign. Goal is to double the number of cities by the year 2020.

• More from awareness raising to implementation of DRR• Lcoal level risk assessments.• Scorecard timeline – indicators workshop in Oct. with many stakeholders,

pilots in locations Sept-Oct., revisions in December. Final version of Scorecard next spring. Not yet developed . We need input from cites . Do we want guidelines? UNISDR needs feedback from U-Score cities for this.

• Words into Action guidelines on implementing the Sendai Framework for DRR will be developed through international working groups that will start this fall.

• Is there a need for both LGSAT and Scorecard?• Should we have one focal point in the country for LGSAT ?• City Resilience Action plans are part of this EU project.

• UNISDR described the action plan as a fundamental framework a city implements for anticipating and addressing potential impacts from disasters caused by natural hazards or a changing climate.

• Addresses what the city needs to do, how to do it, who is responsible for implemention. When do we need to complete activities? What are the indicators and arrangements for monitoring?

• There is a 3 day training program on the City Resilience Action Plan.• Important to mainstream DRR and the 10 essentials in the city’s work

including the city development master plan. • Process flow chart. See ppt.

City Disaster Resilience Action Plans

Chris Findley, UK• Assistant Director of Planning• Several planning challenges.• Port was 3rd busiest in UK at one time. • Media City plan granted in 2006.• BBC in Salford has caused a boom for the city.• New buildings and businesses have been positive for Salford.

• Followed by a tour of BBC and presentations about what they do to keep the building in Media City and the new reporting processes resilient to disasters.

U-Score Midterm Workshop Day 2

Essential 8 – Increase infrastructure resilience - Salford, UK

• The score doesn’t matter it is the process of getting there that is most important.

• Methodology: category 1 & 2 responders, sent out a U-Score template• Very labor intensive with 33 separate indicators just for essential 8• The score might not be representative of the work that they

stakeholders are doing. • Some information could not be shared because of its sensitive nature. • Indicative measuement scales at times are very broad, terminology

not consistent and at times difficult to distinguish between them. It should be uniform throughout the Scorecard. The user has to give consistant response throughout the Scorecard.

Essential 8 Increase infrastructure resilience –Jönköping, Sweden

• Used the Scorecard as a basis for asking the right questions in Swedish to the various stakeholders.

• Private stakeholders- Hard to engage them if you are a small city. Some of the information can be sensitive and the companies do not want the public to know this.

• 11 sectors that deal with protection of infrastructure. • Created a matrix of the set of functions that Jönköping looks at for their own work

with protection of society’s vital functions and compared them with the indicators.• The indicators are hard to assess.• Use business continuity approach.• You can either assess the assets, dependencies and resources at risk and then

look at the scenarios or you can look at the scenarios first and then assets, etc.• The indicators had a lot of numbers. It would be better to identify the most

important assets not just how many of them there are.

Discussion on Essential 8

• Other cities also see this is a big challenge, not just the amount of work but also obtaining information from the public sector.

• The questions were a lot about the loss of services. • If you want to get something useful out of the answers, you have to put the work

into it and you have to describe the inter-dependencies. • It can be hard to provide the evidence for a high rating on the Scorecard even if

the stakeholders feel that they should receive a score of 4 or 5. • The indicators are not actually how we work in Greater Manchester/Salford. • The worst case scenario for Salford can even affect Greater Manchester. • Arvika tried to answer E8 by using the information that we already had from

previous work.• Can we move from risk scenarios to looking at the consequences? Then it would be

easy.

Essential 9 Ensure effective disaster response – Jönköping, Sweden

• They did a matrix of indicators to show if they are general or scenario generated. They also noted if they were about format, context, application or assessment.

• Challenges: complicated indicators• Some of the indicators have to be answered at a regional level, not just city

level.• Involves many different stakeholders.• E8 and E9 are similar. Why are some of the indicators part of E8 and others

part of E9? It is not apparent how or why this division was done. • Outcome: identification and assessment of general function. Assessing what

we need for different scenarios. • There should be an indicator that asks if the measures taken have a positive

affect on building resilience. • If you only look at the concrete infrastructure in place, then you miss the soft

aspects like communication, cooperation etc.

Discussion on Essential 9• Arvika also looked at this but it is the regional/county level that

handles their worst case scenario - nuclear power accident. They could only answer about 4 of the indicators for E9.

• Some indicators ask ”Do you have it?” Others are more in depth. ”Do you know how to use it?”

• It is more than interoperability. Important to collect information about what resources you might need if an emergency occurs.

Essential 10 Expedite recovery and build back better – Stoke-on-Trent, UK

• Recovery should be thought about from the beginning before a disaster occurs. It should be part of the city planning process.

• There are 3 indicators only and they are straight forward and easy to understand.

• Should we wipe out E10 and move the essentials from 10 to another essential or should we add more the indicators to E10?

Final workshop will be in Jönköping• Welcome to Jönköping• 10th biggest municipality in Sweden• 130,000 inhabitants• Regional centre with a university• For the workshop you can take an airplane to Stockholm (Arlanda) or

Stockholm (Bromma), Gothenburg or Malmö. • Arvika will cohost the final workshop.• Topics to present: Water as a theme: Vättern Lake with good drinking

water, the lake is tipping due to geomorpholocial uplift which means too much water in Jönköping.

• 2-day workshop with a field trip.• Outcome and documention , challenges with scorecard, • April 7-8 will be colder, not expecting snow. Bring a warm jacket. Prepare

for rain.

Way forward

• Project leader Anja Holmgren will book telephone meetings once a month until the final workshop.

• How many essentials will you manage. • Before the project is complete: Each city will do one action plan with all the

essentials that the city has completed during the project. This should address the weaknesses and your top priorities.

• Most cities will try to do all the rest of the essentials (Amadora, Jönköping, Salford)

• Try to do a few more essentials and will contact more stakeholders (Arvika).• The publication will be and official document from the project. It is a project

deliverable and UNISDR is responsible for it. All partners will have an opportunity to comment on what should be in the publication. This will be discussed at the monthly project telephone meetings this fall and early spring.

• UNISDR wants a consolidated document on indicators.

Way forward- slide 2

• Comments on refining indicators are needed by UNISDR in 2 weeks. • Cities should deliver their comments about the essentials they have

worked with. Is the indicator worded correctly? If not how should it be reworded? Or what is missing? What should be omitted and why?

• Partners do not need to give general comments on the Scorecard just now, but that will be part of the outcome of the project.

• By the end of the project, the Commission says we need to have detailed comments on the ”indicative measurement”. Please write your proposed text about how to improve it.

• Commission would like the cities to comment on the scores in the Scorecard.

National Level – ANPC, Portugal

Challenges: 1. Diversity of the local level.

One type of city needs help, other cities want guidelines, third type of city – we don’t need help.2. Hard to know who is working with resilience at the local level. Different interpretation of resilience.

3. How to exchange good examples.

Effective measure is that the National Platform now has an activity called Making Cities Resilient. All the cities in the campaign meet. Luis from Amadora is chair. Also there is funding for the MCR campaign.

National Level – MSB, Sweden

3 challenges:1. To attract more actors at all levels (national , county and municipality) to

work with disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and sustainable cities in an integrated way.

2. Development of a national strategy for disaster risk reduction.3. Effective support to municipalities for taking mitigation measures.

1 ( or 2) effective actions at the national level in the last year: 1. Increased knowledge of DRR, what it is, who has experience with it?

Examples of how to create resilience. The national level finances (sometimes with funding from EU) research and development projects, national and international exchanges, seminars and conferences.

2. Increased action of local level DRR, risk assessments, risk management plans (EU Floods Directive) and national level financial support for prevention and mitigation measures.

Mayor of City of Salford

• Ian Stewart is a Salford Scott• Salford is a city with challenges • Fastest growing population outside of London. Fastest growing property

values. Fastest growing economic development (8%). • How did Salford residents deal with economic prosperity?• Film: Greater Manchester and Salford: Celebrating our industrial past