Rapid urbanization coupled with a changing climate spells disaster for many of the world's poor. Almost one billion people across the world live in urban slums built on land that is highly vulnerable to climate impacts like rising sea levels, flooding and landslides. Without significant investments in urban resilience, climate change threatens not only to undermine sustainable development efforts, but also to push over 75 million city residents into poverty by 2030. Building climate resilience, particularly in slum communities, requires an understanding of residents' needs, resources and capabilities, yet poor city-dwellers are often excluded from the urban development and governance processes that aim to reduce vulnerability.

The Urban Community Resilience Assessment (UCRA) helps cities incorporate individual and community capacities - social cohesion, familiarity with local climate risks, early warning systems and disaster readiness - into broader urban resilience evaluations. WRI India is working in urban poor communities of Surat city with local NGOs and the city corporation, to assess community's resilience capacities, and provide a snapshot of peoples' preparedness behaviour, risk perception and strength of social relationships. These findings will enable individuals and communities to identify context-specific adaptation actions, and allow policymakers to engage community members in urban resilience planning.