Takeaways Author: Ratri Sutarto Comments
ASIA

ACCCRN has been established to strengthen the capacity of cities’ practitioners to support governments and communities to build urban climate change resilience. We plan to do this by connecting practitioners in Asia to exchange learning and collaborate to better serve their communities and cities to adapt and improve in the face of climate change. In order to do this, ACCCRN provides programs to enable its member to connect, learn, and collaborate, one of which is social gatherings, the first of which we held at Melaka, Malaysia, on 3 March 2016.

The aim of the social gathering was to provide a venue for our members to get to know each other, to understand what are the interests of each member, and to strengthen our relationship as a community. The social gathering proved to be a valuable experience for both us and our members. There were more than 30 in attendance from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam from more than 20 institutions that want to get to know one another and to connect. We also celebrated one of our member’s birthday: Mrs. Yanti Linehan from Indonesia!

The social gathering not only allows us to socialise but to discuss how ACCCRN can improve our services. Many of our members have stated that they see the benefit of the meet up which allows them to build new networks that could be useful for their work; they are also keen to see if the network could establish a working group to gather people with similar interests, discuss issues and solutions, and perhaps initiate a collaboration between cities or countries.

Furthermore, they are interested to see if the network will be able to provide them with more platforms to learn such as learning exchanges/site visits to other cities to see resilience projects, online learning, or workshops/training on specific topics such as a water project workshop. 

“It was such a nice venue for socializing with ACCCRN supporters. I am impressed by how warm and genuinely concerned this group is with its mission and desire to help cities become more resilient. I look forward to future participation in ACCCRN activities and research," said Claudia Risner.

“Thanks for organizing this social event, it was much appreciated. It was also nice to talk to you about possible ways of organizing the network members for addressing needs,” said Mozaharul Alam, Regional Climate Change Coordinator of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The discussions were all very interesting and there was great input for the network secretariat to improve our services to the ACCCRN community.  Thank you for your participation at the social gathering, it was a great pleasure to meet you in person and we hope we will be able to create a strong and active resilience community with you!

 


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