Manila, September 8 2014 — UN-Habitat’s Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment (VAA) is being adopted by Tacloban City and the municipality of Guiuan as a methodology to structure the Climate and Disaster Risk Assessments (CDRA) which is a requirement for mainstreaming climate change and disaster risk reduction (DRR) in land use planning.

Under the newly released supplemental guideline of the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB), the CDRA is an integral part of the Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP) that will ensure coverage and extensive analysis of spatial and sectoral developments addressing current and future risks and vulnerabilities of the LGU through risk sensitive zoning.

Meanwhile, UN-Habitat also supported the Guiuan Recovery for Sustainable Development Group (GRSDG) last August 21 in updating their initial VAA to lead into preparing their CDRA. Considering Guiuan’s location in the province of Eastern Samar, and as a result of the initial VAA, Guiuan’s development are challenged with eight (8) hydromet and geologic hazards, such as flooding, storm surge, strong winds, increasing temperature in summer, increasing rainfall days in wet months, liquefaction, ground shaking, and tsunami.

In an orientation conducted by HLURB and fully supported by UN-Habitat last August 11 and 12, the Tacloban Recovery for Sustainable Group (TRSDG) expressed the need to pursue the initial work of UN-Habitat on the VAA and use such methodology in preparing the CDRA as basis for mainstreaming climate and disaster resilience into its CLUP. The work of UN-Habitat will cover technical assistance to Tacloban in collecting and analyzing climate and hazard information, scoping the potential impacts of disasters and climate change and organization of exposure database development and CCVA summary.

The Cities and Climate Change Initiative in Philippines, a UN-Habitat programme that supports local governments to more readily respond to the climatic threats, intends to enhance the planning process of Guiuan by plugging in the VAA to determine the extent of the municipality’s exposure to climate change and disasters, to determine sensitivities of the sectors, and to clearly define the municipality’s capacity to adapt to climate change.

In both LGUs, UN-Habitat support on data collection and analysis of potential impacts of disasters will be done through “learning by doing” and in-city coaching and mentoring. The outputs will be dovetailed by the city with the support of UNDP and the Climate Change Commission in processing the CDRA into full-blown CLUPs.