Asian Development Bank – Twelve Years of Advancing Climate Change Resilience in Asian Cities

ADB’s review of the Urban Climate Change Resilience Trust Fund looks back across 74 projects in seven countries between 2013 and 2025. The obvious value of the report is that it provides more than a decade of practical experience in urban resilience rather than another prospective strategy. The more important lesson is that resilience investment required a combination of experimentation, institutional relationships, community engagement, knowledge creation and preparation for later investment, particularly in secondary cities with limited access to expertise and finance. This makes resilience look less like a collection of infrastructure projects and more like the gradual construction of an institutional capability to understand risk and turn it into investment. It also offers a useful test of philanthropy and concessional funding because the trust fund included support from governments and the Rockefeller Foundation intended partly to lay the groundwork for larger action. For shared resilience, the significance is that scaling may mean leaving behind stronger institutions and repeatable processes rather than simply reproducing the original project in more places. The question worth asking of the report is which capabilities survived after individual projects ended and whether those cities became better able to generate their next resilience investment without the same external support.

Read the ADB report