Capacity building plays important roles in increasing city’s resilience from future climate change and extreme weather. “Understanding city’s local characteristic is the key,” Dr. Akhmad Faqih, expert from IPB University said during Climate Resilient and Inclusive Cities First Discussion Panel in Surabaya, 1 March 2023.
According to Dr. Faqih, a lecturer in Department of Geophysics and Meteorology, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, IPB University, the way is by increasing city’s stakeholders’ capacity to evaluate local climatic condition and characteristic. These capacities should be transferred from scientists to stakeholders at city level. The reason is for city stakeholders to be able to perform climate change scientific based analysis using guidelines provided by IPB University.
CCROM of IPB University provides mitigation and adaptation trainings for ten CRIC pilot cities that detail the concept of climate change in global, regional and local context: climate variability, climate change and extremes; climate projection, methods, scenarios and its implication to the development. These trainings also generate climate change projection scenarios using SiBiaS software, analyse climate extremes and report for local climate change scientific basis. Dr. Faqih highlighted that these trainings also facilitate pilot cities’ stakeholders to not only to perform spatial and temporal analysis of the climate – where they observe and re-analyse past climatic conditions – but also to predict future climate models.
CCROM evaluates the results of climate mitigation and adaptation trainings by conducting pre-training and post-training tests. The pre-test and post-test results show that knowledge of CRIC pilot cities has increased by – in average – 14.65 percentage points. Mataram’s working group has seen the biggest increase in test result, jumping from only 48% of correct answers in pre-training test to 73% of correct answers in post-test.
Dr. Faqih suggests that climate change and extreme climate assessment are very important for urban areas. “However, the scope of analysis should be carried out not only in the area, but also in the surrounding areas which are an integral and interconnected parts in terms of hazards and disaster risks,” he said.
Strengthening local stakeholders’ capacity according to Dr. Faqih needs to be continuously improved through detailed methodologies so that the analysis carried out can be more comprehensive and targeted. “Especially with regard to impact-based analysis on the physical environment which is generally unique and specific to each region,” he added.
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