Project Summary

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This project seeks to complement and support the roll out of activities within the Comuna 8 integrated disaster risk management and climate change adaptation plan through providing additional community engagement and engineering-related inputs to the process. We are working with four local communities within the neighbourhoods of Altos de la Torre, El Faro, Golondrinas and El Pacífico, which comprise 25,000 of the 50,000 inhabitants exposed to landslide risk in Comuna 8, part of 150,000 residents exposed to this risk in NE Medellín. The relevance of our activities across Colombia is very high, as UNGRD estimated in 2020 that 80% of the Colombian population (40,344,927 out of 48,258,494) is exposed to high or very high risk of landslides. The project has the following objectives:

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1. To systematise the lessons from various early warning systems and mitigation interventions that have already been piloted in Medellin, to provide a knowledge base for neighbourhoods implementing the plan for Comuna 8.

2. To support the implementation of community-based early warning and low-cost monitoring systems as well as mitigation works and climate change adaptation strategies (e.g. community early warning, water harvesting, community-based Nature Based Solutions) in the four pilot Comuna 8 neighbourhoods  taking account of local soil properties and projected climate change-related variations in the rainfall regime, as a demonstration project for uptake across C8.

3. To train community and administrative cadres in local government in disaster risk co-management in the context of climate change impact and adaptation processes.

4. To support the replication and upscaling of community-based water management, harvesting and treatment that has been piloted in El Faro, as part of an integrated approach to climate change adaptation.

 

The first set of activities (Objective 1) have included a desk-top review to map the range of landslide monitoring, mitigation and NbS initiatives that have been trialled already in Medellin and, in particular, in Comuna 8. This has been complemented by interviews with key stakeholders in the local community, public and academic sectors to evaluate the results and to identify further initiatives. The results have been used to produce a full report and a lay-person summary chart which has been used in the participatory workshops with communities in the four selected neighbourhoods.

 

Objective 2 related activities have included participatory workshops in which the communities identified, prioritised and co-designed key low-cost Nature-Based Solutions (NbS). These were a tree nursery, an agroforestry site, and two water harvesting systems on community halls – all of which were built by community volunteers and will be community-managed.

 

Training of communities as set out in Objective 3 was met through building in training and capacity-building as part of the series of participatory workshops that were held to identify, prioritise and co-design low-cost solutions for their neighbourhoods. This was complemented by specific training related to each of the neighbourhood-level projects, ranging from how to manage a tree nursery to how to maintain a water harvesting system.

 

Objective 4-related activities led to the replication of the community-based water harvesting system in two of the participating neighbourhoods, collecting water from the roofs of community halls. In one case this will be used to supply water to the community hall toilets, and in another for irrigation of a community allotment. In both cases the water harvesting will reduce the amount of surface water in the neighbourhood during periods of intense rain.

 

A final workshop integrating all stakeholders, will focus on the evaluation of the process and its impact and will provide a platform for launching the upscaling of the initial implementation to the wider NE sector.

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Outcomes

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The implementation of each specific set of activities in the four pilot neighbourhoods is resulting on the following:

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• Outcome 1: to accelerate the community-based identification of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures using NbS for their neighbourhood, which will help avoid investment in ineffective solutions.

• Outcome 2: to identify potential synergies between community-led and local government initiatives in disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, and specifically using NbS, which will help support wider strategies both among peri-urban communities in Medellin and in local government. 

• Outcome 3: to increase the numbers of trained community members and government technical staff. This will strengthen community and local government resilience by applying technical knowledge in risk management actions in the context of climate change adaptation processes.

• Outcome 4: to accelerate the uptake of appropriate community-based water management systems and practices that are integrated with disaster risk management and climate change adaptation.