Neighborhood Small Business Climate Resilience Program

Resilient Cities Catalyst’s (RCC) Neighborhood Small Business Climate Resilience Program (NSBCRP) aims to help communities become more resilient to climate change. The program brings together local government, resident leaders, micro and small enterprises to plan and implement projects that address short and long-term climate risks in neighborhood commercial areas.

The NSBCRP in Chennai intends to empower small businesses to better adapt to climate change while ensuring that they contribute to mitigating the same through climate friendly business practices. Therefore, on the one hand the primary goal is to make the small/micro businesses climate ready by strengthening their coping/adaptive capacities. This might be achieved through physical improvements ( e.g., redesigning shops and push carts with climate proof solutions, introducing umbrellas, cool roof solutions, vehicle motors, water kiosks, and flood and drought proof area design), and through capacity building or governance interventions (e.g., skill training, training on disaster preparedness, network/association building etc.)

Simultaneously, the program will transform the business practices of small businesses and vendors to become more climate friendly. This could once again be achieved through infrastructural interventions (e.g., encouraging use of energy efficient appliances/ solar battery generator for shops and pushcarts), better policy compliance (e.g., by avoiding use of single use plastics (SUPs)), and capacity building efforts (e.g., training on sustainable water management, efficient resource use, recycling, segregation, composting etc.). The final choice of interventions will be prioritized through a co-designing process involving all stakeholders, especially the beneficiaries.

In Chennai, Okapi Research & Advisory (Okapi) and Chennai Resilience Centre (CRC) are acting as the local delivery and strategic partners. The NSBCRP is intended to be a two-year program that will unfold in two phases.

Phase 1: The focus will be on identifying the target area and group, mapping the current state of small businesses, assessing the challenges they face due to climate risks, and understanding the needs and concerns of all relevant stakeholders, including beneficiaries, the local community, and the government. It is based on this initial research and co-designing interactions with the stakeholders that a set of interventions will be prioritized and finalized.

Phase 2: Implementation Phase – all the interventions identified collectively will be designed and implemented for the benefit of the target group. Further impact will be assessed towards the end of the program and an exit strategy will be designed to ensure that the interventions provide long term benefits for the small businesses/street vendors.