From insights to action

Co-Designing Community-Based Tools for Climate Resilient Development in Tacloban City

Building on these insights from Guiuan, our research in Tacloban City took a next step: translating local understandings of resilience into practical tools that communities, practitioners, and governments can use to monitor and advance Climate Resilient Development. Working with 29 community members across 9 diverse neighbourhoods, we co-designed a suite of 41 community-based indicators and a locally owned monitoring and evaluation framework. 

Our research began by deep listening. Through participatory workshops, we invited community members to articulate what a climate-resilient Tacloban might look like in their own terms. These conversations surfaced five domains of Climate Resilient Development: (1) Living Well with Nature, (2) Livelihoods and Food Security, (3) Well-Being Peace and Security, (4) Good Relations and Community Solidarity, and (5) Local Knowledge and Community Preparedness. Community insights were then translated into a series of indicators that can be deployed to monitor and evaluate progress toward Climate Resilient Development over time.

Place-based concepts such as kamustahay (the everyday practice of checking in on neighbours) and burubligay (traditions of mutual sharing and assistance) feature as organising principles of the framework. These help capture dimensions of resilience that have no equivalent in global metrics. Alongside these, participants identified human-environment interdependence and emotional well-being as essential but frequently overlooked components of climate resilience. The co-designed toolkit ultimately challenges the dominance of top-down approaches to measuring resilience by offering an alternative rooted in local realities, cultural practices, and local knowledges.

Participants also collectively devised a mangrove forest metaphor to visualise their progress in achieving Climate Resilient Development. Each of the five domains is represented by a distinct local mangrove species that is familiar to the residents of Tacloban. The fullness of each tree's canopy indicates how well that domain is being achieved in a given community, providing a simple way to communicate CRD progress. This work demonstrates how research co-produced with local communities can generate practical instruments that help rethink how climate resilience is measured, communicated, and advanced in practice.