CAUDERAY, Elsa, WAIN, John, ALSOBARI, Monir, 2022. Detailed shelter response profile Yemen: local building cultures for sustainable and resilient habitats. Grenoble : CRAterre, Global Shelter Cluster. 71 p.

The organisations backing this document (see back cover) have been working for several years on the elaboration and dissemination of an identification method for local building cultures and practices (LBC/LBP), especially regarding their potential to contribute to Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), and also to shelter and housing responses in post-conflict situations. The aim is to facilitate the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of LBC/LBP and the opportunities they offer – in an adapted version if necessary – in housing reconstruction, retrofitting or improvement projects. In doing so, it is essential to consider that families and communities often live in changing environments due to factors such as conflict, climate change, urbanization, globalization, and changing socio-cultural attitudes. Thus, even if local practices are meaningful, they are challenged, and it is still advisable to find locally manageable solutions and limit innovations so that they can be adopted toward sustainable development and increased local resilience capacity. SRPs are part of a broader set of tools and documents. They are one of the activities of Step 1 Understanding the context of the Protocol Informing choice for better shelter (see link in the box “To find out more” below), developed by the “Promoting Safer Building Working Group” (Self-recovery) of the Global Shelter Cluster.

This document introduces reference data on local building cultures and sociocultural strategies that result in people’s resilience. It also provides evaluation criteria that can help in elaborating locally adapted project- strategies. Context and details differ from place to place, and stakeholders benefit from the collected data to make comprehensive and accurate decisions. Thus, SRPs should not be considered exhaustive. They are just a first level of information that needs to be deepened through field analysis of the specific intervention context. Therefore, it remains essential to organize field surveys that will also allow exchanges with local actors and inhabitants on the constraints and potentials of their territories in terms of access to land, lifestyles, material and human resources, practices, knowledge and construction capacities.