Sub-national governments are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Whether dealing with increasingly frequent flooding events or severe heatwaves and droughts, authorities at regional and city levels are among the first responders when global failures to mitigate planet-warming emissions fast enough manifest as urgent threats to the safety of people and property. It is very appropriate – and possibly somewhat overdue – that they have been hailed as key players at the COP28 negotiating table this year.
That’s why these governments are key users and partners for the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll - the first global study of worry about, and harm from, risks to people’s safety. The data contains key insights about the vulnerabilities and resilience of people and communities around the world in the face of climate-related hazards.
We have been working closely with the Under2 Coalition of sub-national governments, first coming together with their members at Climate Week NYC earlier this year. Together, we convened a roundtable for them to share their own insights on the challenges they face in building resilience to climate change, alongside starting to think about how the World Risk Poll data could help them.
Sub-national perspectives
The sub-national government representatives told us a number of things. Firstly and fundamentally, proactive and pre-emptive resilience and adaptation interventions are still not being given the investment they require, compared with more reactive disaster response measures that are therefore more likely to be required and which cost societies and economies more in the long term.
True resilience requires an inclusive ‘whole of society approach’, that factors in the human and community aspects of resilience, involves all sectors of society and the economy in its planning and delivery, and which does not leave vulnerable groups behind. However, sub-national governments told us about the challenges involved in applying this whole society approach, not least consistently bringing all necessary stakeholders together.
Coupled with these challenges, a lack of robust data on risk and resilience at the sub-national level is holding back decision making. With climate change impacts increasingly taking place faster than data collection can keep pace with, there can be an overreliance on remote, ‘objective’ sources such as satellite data, without a strong complementary understanding of local, on the ground perspectives and experiences.
Filling the data gaps
While these challenges are substantial, the resilience module of the World Risk Poll is a dataset that has a potential part to play in addressing them. It is based on a holistic concept of resilience that assesses strengths and weaknesses at the individual, household, community and societal levels which, coupled with its demographic breakdowns, enables it to support and inform a whole of society approach. While the most recent data was collected in 2021, the next round is being collected right now, with its findings due for publication in June 2024. We will then see if the world is moving forwards or backwards in building its resilience to the greatest safety challenge of our time.
At the Under2 Coalition General Assembly at COP28, we continued our resilience dialogue with sub-national governments – attempting to coalesce around a shared, holistic understanding of resilience, identifying data gaps, and fostering collaboration to fill them.
Lloyd’s Register Foundation is Climate Group’s Resilience Series Partner for 2023, and co-produced the ‘Bridging Perspectives: Sub-national insights on climate resilience in a fast-changing reality’ session at the General Assembly at COP28 on 3 December.