Racing towards resilience will help thousands

The state of Assam in India joined the Race to Resilience campaign through the UN RegionsAdapt programme, committing to enhance climate resilience. This will benefit 63,441 people across 43 vulnerable villages. The UN Climate Change High-Level Champions and the Marrakech Partnership are spearheading the race to a cleaner, safer, healthier and more resilient world, as their website explains. Through their campaigns, Race to Resilience and Race to Zero, they are elevating ambition and mobilizing credible climate action among cities, regions, businesses and investors.

As the programme’s website explains, in the rural villages of Assam, India, where erratic weather and flooding are reshaping rural life, local communities are coming together to safeguard their futures. Assam, India, stands at the frontline of climate change, experiencing rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events like floods and droughts. Between 1990 and 2019, the state’s mean maximum temperature increased by 0.049°C annually, while rainfall exhibited a concerning decline. These climate shifts have triggered devastating flash floods, soil erosion, reduced agricultural productivity, and dwindling water resources, directly threatening the livelihoods of Assam’s rural population, 86% of whom rely on agriculture.

Worsening these environmental challenges, Assam is home to some of India’s most climate-vulnerable districts. Of the 25 most at-risk districts in India, 15 are in Assam. Key drivers of this vulnerability include limited crop insurance, rainfed agriculture, insufficient healthcare access, and high poverty rates, all of which heighten the region’s climate risks and make building resilience more difficult. In response, the Assam government launched the Chief Minister’s Climate Resilient Village Fellowship Programme (CMCRVF) in 2022. This initiative engages post-graduate science and engineering students to implement climate-resilient solutions in 100 villages, targeting Assam’s most pressing climate challenges at the grassroots level. The programme is focused on boosting the adaptive capacity of highly vulnerable villages. By developing tailored, village-specific action plans, the CMCRVF tackles the root causes of vulnerability, such as weak infrastructure and limited access to resources. Importantly, the programme empowers communities to play an active role in decision-making, while the involvement of youth injects fresh ideas and innovative approaches to climate resilience, creating the next generation of climate leaders.

At the COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, governments agreed that mobilizing stronger and more ambitious climate action was urgently required to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. To connect the work of governments with the many voluntary and collaborative actions taken by cities, regions, businesses and investors, nations decided to appoint two High-Level Champions. The UN Climate Change High-Level Champions for COP25 and COP26, Gonzalo Muñoz and Nigel Topping, established the Climate Champions Team to help deliver on their mandate to enhance ambition and strengthen the engagement of non-State actors in supporting Parties, working with the Marrakech Partnership, to deliver the goals of the Paris Agreement.

The Race to Resilience campaign aims to building the resilience of 4 billion people. It is working towards putting people and nature first in pursuit of a resilient world where they do not just survive climate shocks and stresses but thrive despite them. It is a race to catalyse a step-change in global ambition, to accelerate the investment and implementation of adaptation solutions, and to put people and nature first in the pursuit of a resilient world.

The Campaign was launched in January 2021 at the Climate Adaptation Summit, alongside the State-driven Adaptation Action Coalition. The ultimate goal is to increase the resilience of four billion people living in vulnerable communities, in collaboration with partner organisations from around the world, while developing tools to support them in their work. It prioritises the climate risks faced by urban, rural and coastal vulnerable communities and elevates the potential and actions that businesses, cities, regions, finance sector, local communities and others are already pursuing towards system transformations enhancing resilience. The convening power of the campaign is geared towards increasing the ambition loop by delivering resilience breakthroughs and mobilising and increasing financial flows for resilience. Race to Zero is a global campaign rallying non-state actors – including companies, cities, regions, financial and educational institutions – to take rigorous and immediate action to halve global emissions by 2030 and deliver a healthier, fairer zero carbon world in time.