Honiara Urban Resilience and Climate Action Plan (HURCAP)

Honiara, the capital city of the Solomon Islands, faces a myriad of resilience challenges. Not only is the city already exposed to multiple natural hazards, a changing climate will amplify many of the adverse impacts into the future. At the same time, rapid urbanization - most obviously expressed through the growth of informal settlements in urban and peri-urban areas - is heightening community exposure and sensitivity to a range of climate and non-climate shocks and stresses.

In order to begin addressing these critical urban challenges, an initial vulnerability assessment was conducted as part of the UN-Habitat ‘Cities and Climate Change Initiative’. Published just before the major 2014 Honiara flood event, the assessment had identified some of the most vulnerable informal settlements; and these were the communities that were worst impacted by the event. This experience of a recent natural disaster reinforced the need for actions to make communities in the city, particularly the urban poor, more resilient to other shocks and stresses in the current day and into the future.

To address this agenda, the vulnerability assessment was followed up by local adaptation planning activity that was designed to identify key issues, and establish priority objectives, for enhanced community resilience. This process was carried out in close collaboration with key stakeholders at different levels across the city (community, ward, and city-level); involving representatives from national, provincial and city government, NGOs, as well as members of vulnerability ‘hotspot’ communities. The Honiara Urban Resilience and Climate Action Plan (HURCAP) represents the culmination of the program of adaptation planning activity and sets out a portfolio of adaptation actions that can be implemented to directly contribute to resilience building in Honiara.