Community Resilience in Urban Areas Manual
Helping communities in Northern Ireland prepare, respond and recover from flooding.
The toolkit manual was developed as part of the EU-funded Community Resilience in Urban Areas (CRUA) project.
The two-year project (2015/2016) was led by the British Red Cross emergency response team in Northern Ireland and involved the:
- Hungarian Red Cross
- Danish Red Cross
- International Federation of Red Cross
- Red Crescent Societies Psychosocial Centre
- Red Crescent Climate Centre
- External stakeholders working in emergency response that brought experience and expertise to the project.
About the project
The project was developed in response to communities in Northern Ireland experiencing more extreme and frequent flooding events. It was a community led project which addressed people’s concerns about future flooding events and their desire to be better prepared.
The toolkit sets out detailed guidance for a community resilience programme to help people prepare, respond, and recover from flooding. The programme puts the community at the heart of resilience building, working with relevant statutory responders and local agencies.
It is designed to help a community’s resilience to flooding by:
- increasing awareness about flood risk
- identifying local vulnerabilities and capabilities
- developing local community emergency plans.
It is aimed at emergency planners, community leaders, voluntary organisations, statutory agencies and anyone with a role in community resilience.
The toolkits
The manual is comprised of four toolkits.
- Needs assessment toolkit: a complete ‘how to guide’ to understand community experience, issues, obstacles, needs, vulnerabilities, and local assets.
- Community workshop toolkit: a full range of workshop exercises and training to build resilience through raising awareness of local risks, undertaking a vulnerability and capability assessment, and producing a local community emergency plan.
- Leader Training Toolkit: to build the capacity and capability of local community leaders to activate local community emergency plans in future flooding events.
- Community Emergency Plan template: details the actions a community can take, and the resources it can access to prepare, respond, and recover from an emergency. This does not replace the work of statutory agencies, but rather compliments this work to maximise local community resilience.
