The Resilience Gap: What Communities Need Before Climate Shocks
About the Session
Resilience is often discussed after a crisis has already happened. But whether a community can withstand and recover from a climate shock depends heavily on what was in place before it arrived.
That includes health systems that can continue delivering care, schools that can keep children learning, livelihoods that can withstand disruption, trusted communication networks, and local organizations able to respond quickly. It also means investing in the relationships and alliances that allow governments, communities, funders, and civil society to work together when normal systems are under pressure.
Climate shocks do not affect everyone equally. Women and girls can face particular disruptions to education, livelihoods, health, safety, and economic participation. Strengthening resilience therefore means addressing gender equity alongside climate preparedness, including access to finance, childcare, leadership opportunities, climate-smart livelihoods, and community-owned responses.
This session will explore what it takes to build resilience across systems rather than through isolated projects. How can health, education, livelihoods, disaster response, and community leadership reinforce one another? What should be locally owned? Where can technology and data help services continue through disruption? And how can governments and funders invest in resilience before a crisis makes its value impossible to ignore?
The goal is to move from responding to individual disasters toward building communities and systems that are better prepared for whatever comes next.
Discussion Group Leaders
Carina Hirsch is Interim Chief Executive & Head of Advocacy at Margaret Pyke Trust, advancing women’s and girls’ health by integrating sexual and reproductive health and rights into global biodiversity and climate policy.
Darlene Laure Karamutsa is Co-founder & Executive Director at Isôoko Community Development, advancing women’s economic empowerment in Rwanda through community-led leadership, entrepreneurship, and livelihood programs.
What to Expect
A cross-sector conversation about what resilience looks like in practice. Participants will draw lessons from community-led disaster response, resilient health and education systems, climate-smart livelihoods, crisis communications, and locally led climate action.
The discussion will focus on the practical connections between these systems and what it takes to scale approaches that strengthen resilience over the long term, not only during an emergency.
Who This Is For
This session is for climate and adaptation practitioners, humanitarian organizations, governments, funders, health and education leaders, women's organizations, community leaders, disaster response practitioners, and others working to strengthen resilience in climate-vulnerable communities.
What You Will Get Out of It
A systems-level view of what makes communities resilient to climate shocks
Lessons from community-led and sustainable disaster response models
Approaches to strengthening health, education, and livelihoods before crises occur
Perspectives on why gender equity and women's leadership are central to climate resilience
Ideas for financing and scaling locally led resilience across sectors