Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance

The Program

2018 – 2024

Partners: Zurich Insurance, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Practical Action, Concern Worldwide, Plan International, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the London School of Science and Economics (LSE), Mercy Corps

Funding Amount: $2,860,000 (ISET); $28,000,000 (total across all partners)

Funder: Z Zurich Foundation

Monitoring, Evaluation + Learning (MEL)

Program Design + Implementation

Resilience Tools + Frameworks

Applied Research

Technical Consultancies

Overview

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (the Alliance), was a multi-sectoral partnership focused on finding practical ways to help communities in developed and developing countries strengthen their resilience to flood risk. The Alliance began in 2013 with funding from the Z Zurich Foundation for an initial five years. ISET joined at the beginning of Phase II, running from July 2018 through December 2024. Since 2024, the Alliance, now known as the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance, has broadened its focus to other climate hazards in both rural and urban communities.

The Alliance consists of humanitarian, NGO, research, and private sector partners who work together to increase public and private investment in evidence-informed, community-based flood resilience. As an Alliance, we work to achieve our objectives through long-term, flexible community programs, producing new research, sharing our knowledge, and influencing key stakeholders on flood and climate resilience.

The Alliance takes an approach which centers communities in the process of generating resilience data. This data is then actively used to build resilience in and with those communities. This approach, the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC), is the Alliance’s participatory approach to measuring flood resilience at the community level. The FRMC — which consists of a conceptual framework and an associated practical tool for implementing the framework in practice — guides users through a structured process for generating evidence about the ways in which a given area or community is and is not already resilient to flooding and provides insight into what is needed to further build resilience.

What we delivered

By combining advocacy, community programming, and capacity building, ISET works with Alliance partners to build resilience in over 400 communities around the world.

ISET has four primary roles within the Alliance:

Working across the full spectrum of Alliance partners and countries to integrate knowledge and learning into Alliance programming.
Leading on monitoring and reporting and the packaging of that information for use. Using annually reported data from all country teams and organizations, ISET creates both an annual progress report tracking how the Alliance is performing relative to our intermediate and high-level goals, and a learning report for use both internal to and external of the Alliance.
Supporting the capacity development of Alliance country teams across the full Alliance geography, particularly with respect to integrating climate change information into their projects, building their resilience understanding, and drawing out and packaging shared learning;
Delivering direct community programming in 12 communities in Central and Southern Vietnam. In this work, we are applying the FRMC to understand flood risk and opportunities for building climate resilience, and connecting the work to government-mandated community disaster risk management planning. We complement our community work with knowledge generation and active advocacy across scales aimed at improving the integration of resilience thinking and climate risk reduction into Vietnamese planning and development across scales.

Key outcomes/results

Led the development and ongoing management of a Monitoring, Reporting, and Learning system for the Alliance. This has included engaging in the development and, two years later, revision of the Alliance Global Theory of Change, and working with the Foundation and other Alliance partners to establish an approach to measuring not just direct and indirect beneficiaries, but impact beneficiaries resulting from both our direct programming in communities and via significant advocacy successes.
Produced annual Alliance Progress and Learning reports. Together, these constitute a multi-year record of the Alliance’s progress and successes, but also identify the challenges we have faced and the ways we have addressed those challenges.
Delivered direct community programming and advocacy in Vietnam.
Supported an expert review of the FRMC and the development of a new, multiple hazard version, the Climate Resilience Measurement for Communities (CRMC), used by the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance since 2024.
Applied research (see the Foundations for Change learning report series linked below and the program page on Post-Event Reviews).