Profile:
Sasank Vemuri is Urban Resilience Specialist currently working as a staff consultant for the Urban Climate Change Resilience Trust Fund (UCCRTF) at the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He is a climate change specialist with extensive experience across the Asia-Pacific Region in preparing policies, implementing projects and developing local capacities that support communities in building resilience to the impacts of climate change. His professional expertise lies at the nexus of community-oriented climate change project formulation and finance. Prior to joining ADB, Sasank worked for 8 years at the GIZ.
In addition to having lived and worked in the US and Germany, Sasank has experience working in Bangladesh, India, Kyrgyz Republic, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. He has designed and conducted courses on Cities and Climate Change and Financing Urban Infrastructure with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Singapore and CITYNET in Seoul. Sasank has been an invited as an expert panelist to speak at various organizations and universities on urban resilience in Asia including the OECD in Paris, the UN in New York and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Sasank is also a Rockefeller Foundation Global Fellow for Social Innovation.
Sasank Vemuri
Urban Resilience Specialist Sector Advisory Service Division
Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department Phone: +63 929 670 6922 | Email: [email protected]
OUTLINE
20/20 Hindsight: Gaps, Blind spots and Things We Wish We’d Have Known Sooner in Financing large Scale Urban Resilience Investments
Key message: There are widely diverse options for urban resilience planning, but many of them are not leading to large scale
investments.
Example cases: M-BRACE (USAID and ACCCCRN) from Hue, Vietnam; Pautukali, Bangladesh (ADB);
• · Most “bottom-up” plans do have enough information to facilitate decisions on investments
• · City finances are rarely assessed
• · Resilience is still a challenging concept to communicate and design for
• · Because investments happen at the project level, the line between “climate-proofing” and resilience building blurs
• · The right people are not always around the table, particularly investors
• · Giving people a seat at the table is not the same as giving them a voice
Opportunities:
• · Diversity is a good thing, but we need to start learning what works
• · Broaden stakeholder base
• · Strengthen capacity of "planners" on finances and investors on resilience
• · Partnerships!
• · Pay attention to cultures and interests
