KORE – Knowledge Resilience – is a knowledge sharing platform to support building resilience to food insecurity and malnutrition in the face of shocks and stresses. It helps inform programming and interventions to strengthen the resilience of agriculture-based livelihoods. The platform provides an overview of tools, approaches, programmes, analyses and methodologies on resilience implemented by FAO and other key partners in different contexts; serves as an integrated and action-oriented platform on resilience-related initiatives; and provides good practices on resilience building.

Resilience

Populations around the world are increasingly exposed to natural hazards (drought, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, disease epidemics, etc.), human-induced crises (socio-economic shocks, conflicts, etc.) and protracted crises (complex, prolonged emergencies that can also combine two or more aspects of the above-mentioned shocks). These disasters and crises can deplete livelihoods, destroy lives and wipe out years of development in a matter of hours or even seconds.

Men and women who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods are often the worst affected, potentially putting their livelihoods, food security and nutrition at serious risk. Resilience programming is key to addressing these challenges.

Resilience is the ability of people, communities or systems to withstand damage and recover rapidly when confronted by disasters or crises.

The increasing complexity of disasters and crises, and their impact on livelihoods, call for cross-sectoral solutions to building resilience. These solutions need to integrate different elements related to food security and nutrition, such as disaster risk reduction (DRR), agricultural risk management, early warning and humanitarian and development activities. Greater inter-sectoral coordination and coherence is also important in order to have a common understanding of resilience, how to measure and analyse it, how to monitor it and how to provide the appropriate policy recommendations to decision-makers.

What is the role of knowledge sharing for resilience building?

Knowledge sharing can play a key role in building resilience. Considerable work is being done on resilience, a fair amount of experience is being gained across sectors, success is finding its way and ad-hoc solutions to constraints are being found. However, the knowledge gained is often not systematically documented and shared, good practices are neither replicated nor upscaled sufficiently and policies are not adequately informed by relevant food security and nutrition information systems. The plethora of tools for food security, nutrition and resilience also point to a need for greater harmonization across approaches.

It becomes increasingly important to improve tools, build synergies around resilience practitioners and initiatives and address the clear danger of duplication and lack of learning.

KORE provides a virtual meeting point for the many communities involved in resilience work, both humanitarian and development, and across sectors and themes, such as food security and nutrition, disaster risk reduction, peacebuilding and climate change.

KORE seeks to bring different skill sets together in one place: data and information providers, data analysts and users, monitoring and evaluation specialists, information and knowledge management experts, project and programme managers, political consultants and policy-makers.

Adequately addressing challenges related to livelihoods and food security will underpin more effective resilience building interventions, and provide decision-makers with robust evidence for more effective policies and actions.