Risk reduction and rehabilitation area involves reducing urban risk and responding to crises through its resilient cities and settlements recovery programmes. It focuses on crisis-affected cities, offering disaster prevention and disaster response services. To ensure equitable access to programme benefits, efforts are made to create conditions that support the participation of women and other vulnerable groups.
Objective and Strategy
The main objective is to increase the resilience of cities to the impact of natural and human-made crises and undertake rehabilitation in ways that advance sustainable urban development. Risk reduction and rehabilitation area leads urban risk reduction, emergency and early recovery-based activities. It provides substantive support and monitor the projects under its responsibility, including the knowledge management activities of its substantive themes.
The strategy for implementing the Risk reduction and rehabilitation area includes the following measures:
- Facilitating the coordination and supporting the implementation of all urban risk reduction, settlements recovery and shelter rehabilitation work by UN-Habitat, through the provision of technical support to field operations, regional offices and other thematic branches of the organization;
- Generating knowledge, lessons learned, tools, guidelines and policy review in respect of UN-Habitat projects;
- Contributing to inter-agency cooperation, partnerships and networking for emergency interventions linked to the provision of long-term technical and capacity-building support to countries facing or recovering from crisis, with a view to improving efficiency and facilitating early recovery in line with UN-Habitat policy;
- Providing substantive inputs to the Inter-agency Standing Committee (IASC) member organizations at the global and country level to promote the recovery and reconstruction of sustainable settlements;
- Maximizing the use of humanitarian funding (where possible) to catalyse early recovery;
- Utilizing humanitarian funding resources to meet immediate needs and catalysing the early recovery of settlements through the implementation of UN-Habitat policy relevant to human settlements and crisis; collaborating with humanitarian agencies and United Nations country teams to link humanitarian action to development planning processes at the local and national levels;
- Facilitating the design and implementation of sustainable and equitable disaster risk reduction programmes in support of the Hyogo Framework for Action and other urban risk reduction initiatives;
- Promoting the development of appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks related to human settlements that address equitable land rights, security of tenure, long-term economic revitalization and local economic development, the provision of basic infrastructure, strategic land-use planning and the restoration of urban environments;
Risk reduction and rehabilitation area promotes post-crisis programming and projects in the areas of risk reduction, settlement recovery and shelter rehabilitation, to ensure the integration of gender-responsive strategic, incremental, and capacity-development activities designed with long-term goals in mind.