What is Coalition for Disaster-Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) and when was it launched?
In September 2019 Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Coalition for Disaster-Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) at the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit in New York, US. It has a secretariat in Delhi, supported by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), to enable knowledge exchange, technical support and capacity building.
What does it seek to do?
The CDRI involves consultations with more than 35 countries.
It is a partnership of national governments, United Nation agencies and programmes, multilateral development banks and financing mechanisms, the private sector, and knowledge institutions that aim to promote resilience of new and existing infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks, thereby ensuring sustainable development.
CDRI’s mission is to rapidly expand the development of resilient infrastructure and retrofit existing infrastructure for resilience, and to enable a measurable reduction in infrastructure losses. Its mission statement notes that, in recent weather and climate-related disasters, up to 66% of public sector losses were related to infrastructure damage. The partnership will be working in the areas of governance and policy, emerging technology, risk identification and estimation, recovery and reconstruction, resilience standards and certification, finance, and capacity development.
The World Bank and the Green Climate Fund (GCF) expressed support for CDRI.
Is it linked to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?
SDG target 9.1 commits to developing sustainable and resilient infrastructure, while target 9.a seeks to facilitate its development in developing countries through enhanced financial, technological and technical support to African countries, least developed countries (LDCs), landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) and small island developing States (SIDS).
How many founding members are there in CDRI?
12 including India.
What is the recent historical background to its formation?
The formation of the Coalition is the result of efforts by India and UNDRR, responding to Modi’s call at the Asian Ministerial Conference on DRR for action to reduce damage to critical infrastructure. India and UNDRR, with the World Bank, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Commission on Adaptation, have hosted two international workshops on disaster-resilient infrastructure in 2018 and 2019, respectively. The partners have also held consultations with more than 35 countries that represent a variety of challenges posed by development, climate, and disaster risk factors. The Third International Workshop on Disaster-Resilient Infrastructure (IWDRI) will take place in 2020.