Building City Capacities for Urban Resilience: Three Learning Modules to Tackle Climate Risks

This post was authored by John-Rob Pool, Mukta Salunkhe, Deepti Talpade, Eillie Anzilotti, Urvi Patel and Priya Narayanan, and originally appeared on WRI India.

The rapid expansion of the coastal Indian city of Kochi has made it increasingly vulnerable to a multitude of climate hazards. Rising sea levels threaten its low-lying geography, unpredictable monsoons cause flooding, and higher-than-average temperatures exacerbate heat stress. While the whole city faces these challenges, marginalized people living in informal settlements — which lack the resources and infrastructure to withstand extreme events — are especially vulnerable. Recognizing the urgency of present and future risks, Kochi has set out to create a roadmap to build long-term resilience and protect its most vulnerable residents.

To support this transformation, WRI India and Cities4Forests — an alliance of more than 90 cities acting to conserve, restore and sustainably manage nature for human well-being — partnered with the Kochi Municipal Corporation and the Centre for Heritage, Environment and Development (C-HED) to conduct a comprehensive climate hazard vulnerability assessment. Using WRI’s Urban Community Resilience Assessment (UCRA) tool, the organizations collaborated to produce the Shaping a Climate Resilient Kochi report. This landmark document for Kochi mapped risks across the city and identified vulnerable populations, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Most importantly, the report offered a clear path for building resilience across Kochi. Recommendations included restoring urban wetlands, strengthening disaster preparedness, and integrating resilience into urban planning. Building on these, Kochi has developed plans for specific interventions, such as the rejuvenation of the Thevara-Perandoor canal to improve drainage and reduce flood risk, a community-led urban greening movement to tackle urban heat, and the creation of community disaster response teams trained to assist during extreme weather events. These actions signal a shift toward a more proactive, inclusive approach to climate resilience, grounded in science and driven by community needs.

Kochi is far from alone in facing intensifying climate risks — and its determination to build resilience now and into the future can offer a way forward for peer cities. As climate change accelerates, cities are increasingly on the front lines of the most severe impacts. Urban areas face myriad growing climate hazards, including rising temperatures, extreme rainfall events, flooding and sea-level rise, that threaten infrastructure, public health, lives and livelihoods. These risks are compounded by rapid urbanization, inadequate infrastructure, and limited planning capacity, particularly in low-income countries. Without urgent action, cities will struggle to adapt, protect their populations, and maintain essential services.

Addressing these challenges requires equipping urban leaders and planners with practical knowledge and tools to embed climate resilience into their cities. To meet this need, WRI India, in partnership with UrbanShift—a global capacity-building platform that supports 23 cities in nine countries adopt integrated approaches to urban development — has developed three new open-source, self-study training modules designed to support urban climate adaptation efforts. These modules focus on (1) assessing vulnerabilities to climate hazards, (2) addressing urban heat through urban greening, and (3) mitigating stormwater risks using nature-based solutions. By enhancing the skills and knowledge of city officials, these resources aim to empower local leaders worldwide to take informed, strategic action against climate risks.

Assessing Vulnerabilities to Climate Hazards

The Climate Hazard Vulnerability Assessment (CHVA) framework, published in 2024 and implemented by an array of cities and other urban local bodies in India, helps identify vulnerable areas, prioritize interventions and ensure that adaptation measures are targeted effectively. Using this framework, the “Assessing Vulnerabilities to Climate Hazards” module shares how city governments can integrate vulnerability assessments into their planning processes, enabling them to channel resources more efficiently, reduce risk exposure and build long-term resilience, especially for those most at risk.

The CHVA approach helped inform Nashik’s 2024 Climate Action Plan by highlighting that 40% of the city’s population is exposed to land surface temperatures above 32 degrees Celsius and 23% of the population lives within areas where waterlogging occurs regularly. Using geospatial data to overlay these hazards, the Nashik CHVA found that 9% of the city’s population is exposed to both above-average temperatures and waterlogging. The CHVA results for Mumbai, used in the city’s Climate Action Plan, demonstrate that 70% of all landslide-prone hotspots in the city are located in informal settlements. This has highlighted the need for targeted adaptation planning, that prioritizes vulnerable communities, to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

Addressing Urban Heat through Urban Greening

Urban heat is a silent killer and presents a growing challenge for cities globally. While typical urban infrastructure — like asphalt roads and metal roofs — can trap heat and intensify the challenge, cities can invest in nature-based solutions, such as urban trees and green roofs, along with blue infrastructure, like rehabilitated waterways and streams. These cost-effective and highly adaptable solutions reduce heat and provide co-benefits like lower energy demand and urban biodiversity. Despite the benefits of urban greening to reduce urban heat, steep implementation challenges remain. For example, in India, cities often see heat stress as more of a fact of life and less as a climate disaster, resulting in fragmented implementation, and uncoordinated and short-term projects.

The “Urban Heat and Greening” module not only builds the case for urban heat as a profound climate risk but also provides cities with tools to address urban heat through data-driven planning and community-led greening initiatives. Tshwane, South Africa shows how cities can empower community members to drive effective heat mitigation strategies. Through the collaborative “Tshwane Heat Watch" project, residents have mapped temperature variations across the city, revealing that informal settlements experience temperatures 5-8 degree Celsius higher than affluent areas. These insights are now informing targeted greening interventions and shade structure development in vulnerable communities. Grounded with examples like Tshwane and supported by data-driven frameworks for analysis and action, this module lays out both short-term and long-term strategies for effective urban heat mitigation. Drawing from real-world examples in cities across the global South, it guides city planners, local governments and community leaders in implementing solutions tailored to local contexts, combining scientific analysis with community knowledge for sustainable heat resilience.

Mitigating Urban Flooding by Using Nature-based Solutions

As climate change intensifies both sea-level rise and extreme rainfall, cities around the world are grappling with more frequent and severe urban flooding. Nature-based solutions that restore wetlands, expand green spaces and integrate permeable surfaces, can help cities better manage flooding and stormwater risks while delivering a host of co-benefits for people and ecosystems.

The “Flooding and Nature-Based Solutions” module offers a deep dive into challenges facing cities and showcases what practical, innovative and sustainable solutions could look like. Recife, Brazil, for instance, is pioneering the use of filtering gardens — which capture and treat stormwater runoff naturally before it enters local waterways — to address both flooding and water quality challenges. By strategically locating these filtering gardens in flood-prone and densely populated neighborhoods, the city is showing how thoughtful and effective nature-based solutions can both improve quality of life and build resilience.  Jakarta, Indonesia has transformed Tebet Eco Park, a once-polluted concrete canal, into a 7-hectare meandering river with riparian vegetation that functions as a natural sponge, absorbing excess rainwater and mitigating flood risks locally and downstream. This has created a community gathering space while enhancing biodiversity and addressing flooding challenges. The Flooding and Nature-based Solutions module highlights how, when it comes to flooding and stormwater solutions, cities can and should think proactively and holistically, with long-term projects and goals in mind. Improving urban water resilience can also improve quality of life for residents and support natural ecosystems. This module guides practitioners in mapping out and measuring the cascading benefits of flood-resilient infrastructure, to make the case for action by policy and decision-makers in cities.

These new capacity-building modules mark a significant step forward in empowering cities with knowledge to assess climate risks and implement nature-based solutions for urban heat and flooding. They reinforce the efforts of WRI India and UrbanShift to offer practical tools and best practices that can help cities across the world build resilience and prosper in the face of climate change.