The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance is a multi-sectoral partnership which brings together community programs, new research, shared knowledge, and evidence-based influencing to build community flood resilience in developed and developing countries. Our vision is that floods should have no negative impact on people’s ability to thrive.

This report presents lessons from Year 3 of Phase II of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance community engagement, learning, research, and advocacy work. The report focuses on how the Alliance structure and culture have allowed us to adaptively manage to ensure continued focus on flood resilience and progress toward our goals, while also addressing COVID-19 needs and concerns.

Enabled by the Z Zurich Foundation’s flexibility and the Alliance’s overall proactive programming approach, we continued to progress on our advocacy and programming in 2020. With the Alliance’s commitment to maintain our flood resilience engagement throughout the pandemic, we avoided fully pausing our programs and maintained our flood resilience focus. Our ability to identify pathways for achieving change that have co-benefits for flood resilience and COVID-19 have critically helped us to strengthen our relationships and credibility. Both are foundational to achieving change, as evidenced in previous Foundations for Change reports.

The report presents concrete recommendations for both donors and practitioners regarding why and how to proactively implement similar adaptive management elements in development, risk reduction, climate adaptation, and resilience work.