Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance
The Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance is a collaboration between humanitarian, NGO, research and private sector partners, working to build resilience to climate hazards in rural and urban contexts.
Formerly the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, the Alliance has over a decade of experience in generating evidence of communities’ current levels of climate resilience and identifying appropriate solutions. The Grantham Research institute has contributed leading climate resilience research and policy expertise to the Alliance since 2018 (see more below).
Through long-term community programmes, new research and stakeholder influencing, the Alliance strives to deliver systemic change at scale and realise its vision of a world in which communities are more resilient to climate hazards, and able to thrive.
The Alliance is powered by the Zurich Foundation.
By 2035, alongside like-minded organisations, the Alliance aspires to positively impact 70 million people vulnerable to climate change, and 5.5 million by 2027.
The Alliance will:
- Enhance and increase the resilience of urban and rural communities to climate hazards.
- Promote the widespread adoption of good climate resilience practices.
- Increase the funding available for communities to improve their climate resilience.
- Improve the policy environment for building community resilience to climate hazards.
Our role
Building on the success of the Grantham Research Institute’s climate resilience research programme of 2018–2023, as part of the Alliance we are co-developing a series of innovative new research projects, with a particular focus on adaptation policies, governance and decision-making for multi-hazard scenarios. These research projects will be implemented from 2025 onwards. We also co-lead the Alliance’s Adaptation Governance theme and support global advocacy and influencing, including setting up a new Alliance Advisory Group.
Swenja Surminski is the Principal Investigator, with Sara Mehryar as the Research Co-Investigator and Anna Beswick as the Policy Co-Investigator for this project.
Grantham Research Institute outputs
Research articles
- Multiple resilience dividends at the community level: A comparative study of disaster risk reduction interventions in different countries (April 2023)
- From managing risk to increasing resilience: a review on the development of urban flood resilience, its assessment and the implications for decision making (December 2022)
- Climate and disaster resilience measurement: Persistent gaps in multiple hazards, methods, and practicability (July 2022)
- Investigating flood resilience perceptions and supporting collective decision-making through fuzzy cognitive mapping (May 2022)
- Supporting urban adaptation to climate change: What role can resilience measurement tools play?(December 2021)
- The risk of corporate lock-in to future physical climate risks: the case of flood risk in England and Wales (November 2021)
- New build homes, flood resilience and environmental justice – current and future trends under climate change across England and Wales (November 2020)
- National laws for enhancing flood resilience in the context of climate change: potential and shortcomings (August 2020)
Policy reports
- Accounting for sustainable development co-benefits: insights from local experiences with climate resilience interventions (July 2023)
- The triple dividend of building climate resilience: taking stock, moving forward(November 2022) PERC Flood event review ‘Bernd’(June 2022)
- Is national disaster legislation ready for climate change? (January 2021)
- Flood Risk Management in Germany (June 2020)
- Flood Risk Management in England (June 2020)
- Building Flood Resilience in a Changing Climate: Insights from the United States, England and Germany (June 2020)
- Nature-Based Flood Resilience: Reaping the Triple Dividend from Adaptation in: From
“‘green”’ to“‘blue finance”:’: Integrating the ocean into the global climate finance architecture (2019)
Consultation responses
- Submission to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s Call for Evidence on the International Development Strategy (2021)
- Written evidence submitted to the EFRA Committee Inquiry on Flooding (2021)
- Submission to the Environment Agency’s consultation on the Draft National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England (2019)
- Submission to Call for Evidence on Flooding and Coastal Erosion by Defra (2019)
Commentaries
- Flood resilience requires more than concrete walls (January 2022)
- Flash floods: a grim reminder that adaptation is as important as reducing emissions (July 2021)
- New homes in poorer areas of England and Wales face undue flood risk (April 2021)
- Promising steps towards creating a more flood-resilient England (August 2020)
- The role of national laws in managing flood risk and increasing future flood resilience (March 2020)
- Flood risk is rising and so must our resilience to it (February 2020)