Attachments
Executive Summary
The humanitarian shelter sector has historically faced significant gaps in preparedness and climate-smart shelter design. These challenges stem from a traditionally disaster-response-focused funding architecture and limited experience in integrating climate change adaptation into shelter design. Organisations often lack the bandwidth and resources to test and evaluate various materials and designs with communities, let alone address climate change adaptation through this process.
“Community-led Shelter Modelling for a Changing Climate” (CSMCC) represents a new attempt to address this gap by designing, prototyping, and evaluating climate-smart community-designed humanitarian shelters for populations vulnerable to climate shocks. The model emphasises scaling learning through partnerships with NGOs, INGOs, and governments. Uniquely, it integrates community-led design with insights from climate forecasting models, local climate knowledge, engineering and gender-inclusive methodologies, resulting in more resilient and inclusive shelter solutions.
The implementation of this model in Zimbabwe represents the first piloting of this approach whereby the community-led climate-smart process enabled communities to co-create shelters tailored to their evolving climate-related challenges. We believe this model not only strengthens preparedness for one of the core sectors of humanitarian response but also empowers affected communities with greater agency and equips them to design shelters better adapted to future climate hazards.