Teresina, Brazil, 13 August 2021 -- UN-Habitat has developed a City Resilience Profile and Urban Diagnosis Report for this northern Brazilian city as prelude to multi-stakeholder workshops that will help create the local government’s roadmap to resilience sustainability.

The project comes on the heels of a similar successful two-year project that the City Resilience Global Programme (CRGP) implemented in the Russian city of Yakutsk, known as the coldest city on earth. CRGP, which uses the City Resilience Profiling Tool, is one of UN-Habitat's key programmes working on urban resilience in partnerships with local governments. 

City resilience tackles topics such as  climate change, sustainable urban planning, and safe reopening in the context of COVID-19, all main themes of the World Habitat Day and World Cities Day in October. The average temperature in Teresina increased by two degrees Celsius in the last century, a rate twice as high than the global warming average.  

The upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) will bring parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change which includes the requirement for the strengthening of resilience in the face of climate change as a premise of sustainable development. 

"The global recovery from the pandemic' is not only an opportunity to build resilient cities, but also a responsibility to step up action towards urgent global challenges such as climate change and sustainable economies,” Esteban León, head of the City Resilience Global Programme, said.

“UN-Habitat's City Resilience Global Programme, under its multi-hazard, multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral approach, accompanies local, regional and national governments in identifying specific urban actions towards resilience and sustainability," he added.

Residents of 300 cities in Brazil rely on Teresina, capital of the state of Piauí, for health services and the city also has the highest Basic Education Development Index score among early childhood education among Brazilian capitals.

The Municipality of Teresina, the Government of Brazil, and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme signed a cooperation agreement for the implementation of the Teresina Urban Resilience Programme in 2019. Through this agreement, the parties have agreed to work together to build technical capacity for urban resilience in the municipality and to produce a strategic action plan for the city, called Actions for Resilience and Sustainability.

With over half of the global population living in cities, and with around three billion more people expected to live in urban areas by 2050, cities are facing unprecedented demographic, environmental, economic, social and spatial challenges. Rapid urbanization coupled with new and magnified challenges resulting from the climate change are resulting in increased risk for populations in cities.  

UN-Habitat’s urban resilience work aims to support local governments and relevant stakeholders to transform urban areas into safer, more inclusive and better areas to live in, and improve their capacity to absorb, adapt, and recover from these potential shocks and stresses, while transforming in a positive way towards sustainability.