Climate change has been recognizing as one of the main issues in creating sustainable development. Climate change is the 13th goal of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which calls for action at the national level to tackle climate change and its impacts. The impact has felt by the world’s population, including the increase in the incidence of natural disasters such as floods due to continuous rain, storms, long droughts, rising sea levels, and an increase in the population of disease vectors that can threaten human life. Besides, it also increases poverty, especially for residents whose livelihoods are in agriculture, plantations and livestock. Also, the commitment to tackling climate change has been ratified by the Government of the Republic of Indonesia in various frameworks of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Although cities are a source of problems, they are also a source and offer solutions for solving problems (United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat), 2011). Semarang will participate in contributing to tackling climate change to protect its vulnerable communities and ensure they have sufficient capacity to adapt, as well as supporting national commitments in facing climate change.
The preparation of the National Action Plan for Climate Change Adaptation (RAN-API) in 2014 is one of the steps taken by the national. The RAN-API is part of Indonesia’s national development planning framework which expected to provide direction for the Government Work Plan and the Future National Medium Term Development Plan (RPJMN), to be more responsive to the impacts of climate change. The preparation of an adaptation action program aims to ensure or secure the achievement of the main targets of development and increase community resilience, both physically, economically, socially and environmentally against the impacts of climate change (BAPPENAS, 2014). The RAN-API is also a reference for local governments in preparing regional action plans for climate change adaptation as well as a direction in preparing development planning documents that are climate change resilient. For the implementation of climate change adaptation in the regions, it is necessary to formulate a regional action plan that refers to the Regulation of the Minister of Environment and Forestry Number 33 of 2016 concerning Guidelines for Formulating Climate Change Adaptation Actions.
To minimize risks and anticipate the impacts of climate change, the Semarang City Government requires a series of adaptation strategies, which then translated into climate change adaptation programs involving all stakeholders in Semarang. These adaptation strategies and programs compiled in the framework of the Semarang City Climate Change Adaptation Regional Action Plan (RAD-API) study to increase community resilience and have a city development system that is increasingly adaptive to climate change. The study about RAD-API was carried out in 2019 in collaboration with PT. Pyramid and involving experts from Diponegoro University and IKUPI.