Strengthening urban resilience in informal settlements: the SECURe framework in practice

By 2050, an estimated 68% of the world’s population will live in cities, making inclusive disaster risk reduction and urban resilience increasingly critical.

Yet informal settlements, which often lack basic public services and security of tenure, remain systematically excluded from urban resilience planning, despite being highly vulnerable to climate-induced stresses.

The Strengthening and Enhancing Contextual Urban Resilience (SECURe) framework responds to this challenge by centring urban resilience interventions around governance and gender and social inclusion. This approach is especially effective in identifying and redressing power imbalances in resilience planning.

This briefing shares lessons from the use of the framework in strengthening urban planning in informal settlements in Ajmer, India and Durban, South Africa.