Climate Resilient Action Plans for coastal urban areas:

Sri Lanka readies for climate change

Senior Government officials, academics, members of local authorities, officials of UN agencies and Non-Governmental Organisations as well as schoolchildren participated in the National Forum on "Climate Resilient Action Plans for Coastal Urban Areas" in Colombo recently.

The Forum discussed key outcomes of the project "Climate Resilient Action Plans for Coastal Urban Areas in Sri Lanka and shared the draft National Statement on Cities and Climate Change Adaptation.

The Secretary to the Ministry of Environment, B.N.U.D. Basnayake participated as chief guest while Mrs. M.S.M. Mohomad, Secretary, Ministry of Disaster Management was the guest of honour. The project partners participating at the event included Prof. Harsha Ratnaweera, Senior Advisor, Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), Prof. P.K.S. Mahanama, Dean, Faculty of Architecture, Moratuwa University, Chris Radford, Acting Director, UN-Habitat Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific and Laxman Perera, Country Programme Manager for UN-Habitat Sri Lanka.

The National Forum was organised by the project partners to share validated city level activities from the project areas of Batticaloa and Negombo and validate the National Statement on Climate Resilient Cities with the relevant provincial and national institutions.

Basnayake addressing the gathering, said Sri Lanka is experiencing the impacts of climate change with increased incidents of droughts and floods. He said cities need to be prepared with specialised tools to deal with climate change impacts. Basnayake said the recently concluded program had created a model for climate resilient cities which can be replicated in other cities in Sri Lanka. Mrs. Mohomad said impacts of disasters could only be minimised through a coordinated approach of all public and private sector organisations, communities and development partners and by main streaming disaster risk reduction into sectoral programmes and projects. She said it is important for all agencies working in this sector to share knowledge and experiences, document good practices and work together to make the communities, cities and the whole nation resilient to climate change.

Following the inaugural ceremony, several interactive sessions were conducted to share lessons learnt from the project and to present the National Statement on Climate Resilient Coastal Cities of Sri Lanka.

The project "Climate Resilient Action Plans for Coastal Urban Areas" was implemented from October 2011 - January 2013 by the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat) in partnership with the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), University of Moratuwa (UOM), Batticaloa Municipal Council (BMC) and the Negombo Municipal Council (NMC).

The project was prepared in consultation with the Ministry of Environment to support climate change activities of the country and is funded by the Nordic Climate Change Facility. The project was implemented in the Batticaloa and Negombo Municipal Council areas.