page_title: Climate resilience
section_title: Low-cost engineering solutions
hierarchical_section_title: Climate resilience / Climate resilience in practice / Local and community level / Low-cost engineering solutions
caption_attribution_description: English: The capital of India, New Delhi is a city within a city -- part of the Delhi metropolitan area, which occupies nearly 1,500 square kilometers (537 square miles) and is home to nearly 22 million people. New Delhi was established in the early 1900s as the capital of the British Empire in India, and it became the Indian national capital after the country gained independence in 1947. The city is simply Delhi's newest incarnation; cities have been located at the site for thousands of years. This image of New Delhi was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov (ASTER) on NASA's terra.nasa.gov Terra satellite on September 22, 2003. The city has undergone lots of changes between 2003 and 2013. The dramatic differences in the landscapes tell some of the city's history. When the British moved the capital of their empire from Calcutta to Delhi, they built New Delhi on the west bank of the Yamuna River, south of the Old City. The Old City, which had been the last capital of the Mughal Empire, had densely packed, low-rise buildings, crowded along narrow, irregular streets. Little vegetation interrupted the urban expanse. In contrast, the buildings of New Delhi were laid out along wide, tree-lined avenues that connected monuments, parks, and government buildings. Among the most obvious of these avenues is the Rajpath, visible as a green strip across the heart of New Delhi. The Rajpath connects the grounds of the President's estate on the west to the India Gate (a World War I memorial) on the east. To the west of New Delhi is the Central Ridge Forest Reserve, which gives a hint of how the landscape would have looked before human development. The vegetation is a mixture of thorn scrub and woodlands. Ecologists debate how abundant the thorn scrub would actually have been in the pre-settlement landscape. It may be the result of degradation of the tropical dry forests through grazing and other agricultural activity over centuries. Northwest of the urban forest is a patchwork of fertile and fallow fields that are part of the campus of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute. ASTER image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/ ASTER Science Team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.
context_page_description: Climate resilience can be generally defined as the capacity for a socio-ecological system to: absorb stresses and maintain function in the face of external stresses imposed upon it by climate change and adapt, reorganize, and evolve into more desirable configurations that improve the sustainability of the system, leaving it better prepared for future climate change impacts.
  With the rising awareness of climate change impacts by both national and international bodies, building climate resilience has become a major goal for these institutions. The key focus of climate resilience efforts is to address the vulnerability that communities, states, and countries currently have with regards to the many consequences of climate change. Currently, climate resilience efforts encompass social, economic, technological, and political strategies that are being implemented at all scales of society. From local community action to global treaties, addressing climate resilience is becoming a priority, although it could be argued that a significant amount of the theory has yet to be translated into practice.
context_section_description: Equally important to building climate resilience has been the wide array of basic technological solutions have been developed and implemented at community levels. In developing countries such as Mozambique and Tanzania, the construction of concrete “breaker” walls and concentrated use of sandbags in key areas such as housing entrances and doorways has improved the ability of communities to sustain the damages yielded by extreme weather events. Additional strategies have included digging homemade drainage systems to protect local infrastructure of extensive water damage and flooding. 
  In more urban areas, construction of a “green belt” on the peripheries of cities has become increasingly common. Green belts are being used as means of improving climate resilience – in addition to provide natural air filtering, these belts of trees have proven to be a healthier and sustainable means of mitigating the damages created by heavy winds and storms.
caption: An aerial view of Dehli, India where urban forests are being developed to improve the weather resistance and climate resilience of the city
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