IGES is honoured to have been selected as one of the recipients of the 2017 Dubai International Award for Best Practices (DIABP) University Research Award on Legislation, Rules, Regulations & Governance Systems for its work “Making land-use climate-sensitive: A project to increase resilience of cities against floods by integrating climate change into land-use planning”.
The project, generously supported by the Japanese Ministry of Environment, has been implemented in collaboration with the University of the Philippines, Los Baños, local governments in the Silang-Sta. Rosa subwatershed , and the Laguna Lake Development Authority (LLDA) since 2014. Working together with the Low Carbon Asia Research Network (LCS-RNet), IGES used information and communications technology (ICT) tools such as geographic information systems (GIS), satellite imagery, land-use change and hydrological models to formulate a “Participatory Watershed Land-use Management (PWLM)” methodology aimed at i) better assessing flood hazards, ii) examining the exposure of people and assets, and iii) evaluating the effectiveness of climate sensitive countermeasures to support more informed local policy-making in the Phiippines.
Based on these efforts, four local governments revised their Comprehensive Land Use Plans (CLUPs) with updated information on flood-prone areas and flood-affected populations, taking note of measures to avoid / lessen the impact of natural hazards; the City of Santa Rosa also formulated its Local Climate Change Action Plan (LCCAP). The project is currently being replicated in other subwatersheds (i.e. the Los Baños and Pila subwatersheds) in the Lake Laguna basin of the Philippines.
Sponsored since 1995 by the Dubai Government in collaboration with UN-Habitat, the award “represents the importance of strong and coherent partnerships in implementing the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goal 11 both [with regard to] the sustainable development of human settlements and protection of the environment”.