Through its combination of analytical approaches, the VNCRI has proven itself to be a useful tool for monitoring city resilience which, because it is a comparative index, also provides incentive to improvement through competition between cities for higher rankings.
The project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which has a decade-long interest in developing methods to monitor and improve city resilience, but was made possible by Decision 2623 of the Prime Minister on Urban Climate Adaptation. Under Decision 2623, the Urban Development Agency under Vietnam’s Ministry of Construction, was tasked with developing a database on urban climate adaptation. By nature of the implementing agency, this database would need to focus on issues related to construction and planning in the public domain. Thus, not only would the project need to adapt the CRF for use as a national, comparative index, it would also need to do so with a focus on the data collection needs of the Urban Development Agency.
In the initial design phase, the core group composed of staff from The Asia Foundation (TAF), the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET) and the Urban Development Agency (UDA) focused on three levels of assessment using the CRF’s four dimensions, 12 goals, and 52 indicators as guide. Quantitative variables would serve as proxies for relevant indicators. Qualitative scenarios would use a 1-10 scale to rate each city’s performance in meeting the objectives of these same indicators.