Our Impact
Since 2013, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance has been working to strengthen community flood resilience, increase funding for flood resilience, and positively influence global, national and subnational policies.
Based on the successes of the first five years, the Z Zurich Foundation extended funding for a second phase running from 2018 to 2024. The Alliance committed to build the resilience of 2 million people, and increase investment towards resilience by USD 1 billion, across this period.
By the end of 2023, the Alliance had surpassed these goals: our community programs and advocacy have beneficially impacted 3.14 million people and influenced USD 1.26 billion of funding towards resilience.
Evaluation and learning
We are committed to the ongoing measurement of outcomes and impacts, through annual reporting by all Alliance members. We look beyond the numbers at less tangible indicators, such as knowledge gained about key vulnerabilities and risks, or shifts in behaviour and policy that can lead to lasting benefits for communities.
Our Progress reports track the impact of the Alliance’s programmes year on year, while ‘Foundations for Change’ – our series of learning reports – identifies key lessons, achievements and examples of best practices that can be used or adapted by others.
Stories of resilience
Flor's story - Bolivia
Truong's story - Vietnam
Mollika's story - Bangladesh
The future
After more than a decade of experience in building community resilience to floods across the world, the Alliance is beginning to expand its approach into additional climate hazards, including heatwaves and wildfires. We aim to address the increasing demand to accelerate climate-change adaptation by measuring resilience to multiple hazards, whilst continuing to put communities at the centre of all our work. Influenced by our teams’ most significant successes to date, we will also focus more intentionally on system change to achieve greater impact at scale.
With the continued backing of the Z Zurich Foundation, we aim to impact at least 5.5 million people in the next four years – with ambitions to create sustainable, positive change and a better future for up to 70 million people through our climate adaptation programming by 2035.
Key themes
Early Warning Systems
Early Warning Systems (EWS) help those at risk of floods, heatwaves and other climate hazards to take meaningful and impactful action to keep themselves and their assets safe – yet they remain absent from many at-risk communities. In others, the information provided by the EWS is hard to access or understand, leading to costly inaction. As well as supporting communities in developing and maintaining inclusive systems, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance is working with partners to achieve sustainable change at scale in EWS, so that they deliver essential services for the most vulnerable.
Adaptation Governance
Climate adaptation governance refers to the set of actors, policies, processes, and institutions through which societies adapt to the impacts of climate change. It encompasses a wide range of decisions, strategies, and actions taken by governments, communities, businesses, and other stakeholders to adapt to changing climate conditions and reduce vulnerability to its effects. At the local, provincial, national and global levels, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance works with multiple stakeholders to influence effective government adaptation policy and practice. To achieve this we focus on:
- Supporting effective adaptation policies, strategies, and plans
- Advocating for and influencing access to increased amounts of high-quality adaptation finance
- Increasing technical expertise and capacity
- Enabling stronger collaborations and partnership working
Heat
Incidents of extreme heat are becoming more frequent, more intense, and more deadly. Infants, older people, and those with chronic health conditions are particularly vulnerable to heatwaves, especially those in cities. Extreme heat also has significant consequences for other areas of society, such as reduced economic output, strained health systems, and rolling power outages.
Drawing on over a decade’s experience of identifying and managing flood risks, and using a data-driven, collaborative approach to determine the most appropriate interventions, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance is working to reduce the impacts of extreme heat events, in both rural and urban communities.
Urban
More than half of the world's population lives in urban areas, projected to rise to two-thirds by 2050. Rapid and unplanned urbanization increases the risk of exposure to disasters, diseases and the impacts of climate change, especially among the poorest and most vulnerable.The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance is building on existing urban-based flood resilience programmes to support communities, authorities and civil society organizations looking to addressing climate resilience challenges specific to urban contexts.