Disasters and Ecosystems: Resilience in a Changing Climate

Disasters kill people, destroy infrastructure, damage ecosystems and undermine development. Climate change is expected to aggravate existing disaster risks. Ecosystem-based approaches for disaster risk reduction can be a strategy with multiple benefits.

This MOOC enhances knowledge and skills for tackling complex issues such as resilience and transformation, sustainable development, ecosystem management, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and how they can be operationalized. It will benefit disaster managers and practitioners, climate change adaptation professionals, development planners, project implementers and policy makers.

At the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Define basic concepts of disasters, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and resilience;
• Recognize key linkages between ecosystems, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation;
• Recognize the linkages and overlaps between ecosystem based disaster risk reduction and ecosystem based adaptation;
• Identify various ecosystem based tools in reducing disaster risk and climate change adaptation
• Identify key international agreements, organizations and initiatives related to disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation;
• Apply concepts and tools of ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction (Eco-DRR) and ecosystem based adaptation (EbA);
• Evaluate costs and benefits of different type of measures for reducing disaster risks; and
• Design your own ecosystem-based project for increasing resilience and reducing climate risks.