By: Stephanie Lyons and Thanh Ngo, ISET-Vietnam
It was excellent to see more than 50 UCR-CoP participants get together at our annual planning meeting last week to catch up, discuss their work in urban climate resilience, and map out collaborative efforts for 2014.
Last Tuesday, February 18, nearly 60 people from around 30 different organizations (representing the majority of the UCR-CoP’s approximately 40 member organizations) met at the offices of the Association of Cities of Vietnam (ACVN) in Cau Giay, Hanoi to plan the UCR-CoP’s direction in 2014.
Everyone had a chance to meet someone they didn’t already know and share the details of their upcoming work in the field of urban climate resilience (UCR) in 2014.
Participants then got together to exchange information and ideas for UCR activities in 2014 – from training and capacity building efforts to policy work, good practice documents, seminars, lessons learned processes, workshops and field trips.
A lengthy list of confirmed, planned and proposed activities was compiled under four categories:
Mainstreaming UCR into policy and decision-making
Sharing knowledge and lessons learned, including through online engagement
Research methodologies and impact
Capacity building and training
Under the above categories, participants separated into working groups to brainstorm and identify opportunities to work together on shared activities in 2014. After reflecting briefly on the most successful and useful activities in 2013 (and why), each group came up with a list of practical steps for taking work forward this year. As a focal point for members to share details of upcoming activities, the shared calendar that can be found in the right column of Urban climate resilience – Community of Practice (UCR-COP) blog is the effective tool to connect members and related stakeholders.
The Urban Development Agency (Ministry of Construction) also provided a highly instructive overview of the recent Decision 2623 (Approval of Scheme ‘Urban Development of Vietnam Responding to Climate Change in the Period 2013-2020’).
The meeting minutes as well as all presentations and other content from the meeting will be shared with all UCR-CoP participants this week. As a co-facilitator of the UCR-CoP, ISET again thanks all those who attended for their enthusiastic contributions. We look forward to continuing to work with you and watching as you take both individual and collaborative efforts forward as participants of the UCR-CoP in 2014.
Original posted by http://www.urbanclimatevn.com