History of Making Cities Resilient

MCR2030 builds on the success of the MCR Campaign, which ran from 2010 to 2020. 

How did we get here?

MCR2030 is built upon the success of the previous decade of advocacy work under the Making Cities Resilient (MCR) Campaign which was launched in 2010 and concluded at the end of 2020. The MCR Campaign, led by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and delivered with partners, achieved considerable success in promoting urban disaster resilience through local government authorities. It advocated the need to reduce risk and develop urban resilience through analysis and action plans, raised cities’ awareness and understanding of systemic issues and their connectedness, and through this process built local capacity and created or strengthened stakeholder partnerships. 

The MCR Campaign promoted the use of a 10-point checklist (the Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient) to guide city governments in resilience planning and decision making. Over 4,360 cities signed up to the MCR Campaign during the past decade and adopted the Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient. Cities that joined the MCR Campaign have made greater progress in reducing disaster risk than cities that have not gone through a similar process of disaster risk awareness.

Moving beyond 2020 into a Decade of Action, cities are in need for more guidance and capacity development in many technical areas ranging from awareness and strategic planning to effective implementation of risk-informed urban development plans. Campaign partners and cities have asked for a follow-up programme that moves beyond advocacy and awareness raising to support cities to assess their resilience status, accelerate the development of local DRR strategies (in response to Target (e) of the Sendai Framework), integrate DRR with climate change adaptation and sustainable development, and then implement those strategies with support from local, regional and global partners.  

More about the MCR Campaign, 2010 - 2020

In its ten year history, the Making Cities Resilient Campaign has had a significant impact on its partners and partner cities, and represents one of UNDRR’s major global achievements. Recognizing the reality that more than half the world’s population is concentrated in cities and towns, and is urbanizing at unprecedented rates in many parts of the planet, the Campaign’s goals of reducing risk and increasing resilience are increasingly relevant. A myriad of challenges from a changing climate, poor urbanization, bad urban design, limited capacity of local governments, and higher exposure to hazards for vulnerable urban populations, undermines the goals and sustainability of the global development agendas across the spectrum, and specifically those related to the urban context.

Read the report

Report on the Making Cities Resilient (MCR) Campaign: Comparing MCR and non-MCR cities

Report on the MCR Campaign (2010-2020): Mapping the campaign's outcomes and greatest achievements in Brazil to continue building urban resilience

Is this page useful?

Yes No Report an issue on this page

Thank you. If you have 2 minutes, we would benefit from additional feedback (link opens in a new window).