AIS highlights systems thinking for National Disaster Resilience Month

From 18 to 19 July 2024, the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation, through the USAID-Climate Resilient Cities Project, held a two-day event in observance of National Disaster Resilience Month. The event, “Resilient Horizons: Advancing Climate Resilience and Disaster Preparedness,” featured keynotes and presentations from various sectors on climate and disaster resilience.

Mr Daniel C Ratilla, Program Head for Climate and Disaster Resilience (CDR) of the Ateneo Institute of Sustainability, represented AIS during the first day of the event, and opened the program with an address titled “Systems Thinking for Climate and Disaster Resilience.” His presentation covered the fundamentals of systems thinking, defining systems and systems thinking, discussing structure and feedback, feedback loops, and resilience as an emergent property of systems. He also discussed how systems thinking and a broader systems approach could be applied to resilience, as embodied in the NDRRMC’s NDRRM Plan 2011-2028 framework.

AIS, through the CDR Program, offers systems thinking workshops for multisectoral participants. The program carries out these workshops primarily through activities in the City Resilience Toolkit or CResT. CResT was developed by a multidisciplinary team in 2020, led by Dr Charlotte Kendra Gotangco Gonzales, former Program Manager for Climate Change and Disaster Resilience and former Director of AIS, as part of the Coastal Cities at Risk Philippines (CCARPH) Project, led by Dr Emma Porio. The toolkit’s resilience planning activities are divided into three modules, arranged along the three phases of systems thinking: Problem Diagnosis, Stakeholder Engagement, and Action Planning.

This year, the CDR program plans to roll out more systems thinking workshops and offer them for stakeholders and partners from local government, civil society, and the academe. To stay updated on the workshop offerings and other similar projects of AIS, kindly refer to AIS’ interest check on public trainings and workshops HERE. To view the livestream of the address and the rest of the program, visit this link.