By Dr. Priya Singh and Prof. Shobhakar Dhakal
A regional dialogue in Bangkok on urban climate adaptation and resilience turns to central questions: what are the key evidences? Why does strong climate evidence still struggle to become sustained urban action? How to accelerate urban climate adaptation actions?
Across Southeast Asia, climate risk in cities is no longer distant. It is already visible in rising heat, recurring floods, extreme climate events, and the gradual loss of ecological systems. These changes are unfolding within rapidly expanding urban regions. The question is no longer whether these risks are understood. The difficulty lies in responding to them in an evidence-based manner, and in the ways that they are sustained and coordinated. Most responses remain limited to individual projects.
The CLARE–ASEAN Regional Workshop and Dialogue, to be held on 12 and 13 May 2026 in Bangkok, is situated within this broader setting.
The dialogue comes at a specific moment. Over the past year, CLARE–ASEAN has moved from design to active research. Work is now underway across multiple countries and cities. Evidence is being generated across sites. What is emerging is not a shortage of data nor a lack of technical capacity. The difficulty lies in linking this evidence to planning processes, financing mechanisms, and implementation on the ground.
CLARE–ASEAN forms part of the wider Climate Adaptation and Resilience programme. It is supported by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Canada’s International Development Research Centre. The initiative operates across seven ASEAN Member States and fourteen cities. It brings together research institutions, government agencies, and communities. The aim is to examine how urban climate adaptation is approached in practice and gather inputs to its evidence tailoring process.
The initiative is coordinated by the Asian Institute of Technology. It is anchored within the Faculty of Climate Change and Sustainability. AIT brings together work across countries, supports regional exchange, and connects research findings with policy processes.
The research is organised across four connected areas. These include nature-based solutions, urban heat, especially in housing and settlements, financing solution, and community-led adaptation experiences, with attention to gender and inclusion. Each addresses a different dimension of urban vulnerability. Yet across these areas, a similar pattern is visible.
In many cities, nature-based solutions show clear environmental benefits. These are visible at the project level. Urban heat is being mapped with increasing precision. Areas of higher exposure and vulnerability are now getting clearer. Community-based responses continue to emerge, often grounded in local practices and social networks. Yet these efforts rarely extend into wider planning systems. They also do not shape investment pathways in a consistent manner.
The gap is structural, not just technical. Planning frameworks exist, but climate risks are not fully integrated. Financing remains fragmented and often depends on external sources and inadequate.
Coordination across sectors is uneven. The same applies across levels of governance. As a result, adaptation remains limited in scale and difficult to scale, even where knowledge is strong.
The workshop is designed to engage stakeholders directly with these realities and foster dialogues. Its sessions bring together key themes, including nature-based solutions, urban heat, climate finance, planning and governance, and gender and inclusion. All are discussed within a shared conversation. The aim is to understand where are the key evidences, where the link between evidence and action breaks down, and what enables that link to hold and accelerate actions.
The dialogue is not an introduction to the initiative. It is a moment of reflection within it. It brings together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. The focus is on what has been learned so far, where the constraints lie, and how different elements of adaptation can be better aligned and accelerated.
What is at stake is not only the improvement of individual interventions. It is the question of how systems begin to work together. Evidence must inform decision-making. It must connect to financing pathways. It must support implementation at scale. The effectiveness of urban climate adaptation will depend on this alignment. It requires knowledge, institutions, and resources to move together rather than in isolation.
