Monday, June 27, 2011

Building Resilience in Cities Adapting to Climate Change

Financing the Resilient City- A demand driven approach to development, disaster risk reduction, and climate adaptation (48 page pdf, Jeb Brugmann, ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, June 3, 2011)

Also discussed here: Financing the Resilient City, An ICLEI White Paper (4 page pdf, ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, June 3, 2011)

A pollution-free city facing change must adapt. Today’s focus is on a report from Resilient Cities: World Congress on cities and adaptation to climate change sponsored by ICLEI- Local Governments for Sustainability. The report recommends a bottom-up approach, aimed at reducing systematic and catastrophic risks that sometimes may be taken on together, using local criteria to decide how to approach the challenges and how to finance them.



Key Quotes:

“a reframing of the adaptation challenge from its primary focus on risk reduction to a broader focus on increasing the performance of the area or system in which the investment is to take place.”

“ resilience as a coherent approach to future urban planning”

“urban areas..will bear up to 80 percent of the US$80-100 billion per year in climate change adaptation costs”

“Catastrophic risks arise from the poor design and location of the built environment including infrastructure, and include vulnerabilities and losses associated with flooding, violent winds, temperature extremes…”

“Systemic risks create sustained losses due to highly inefficient energy, water, food supply, and health care systems, arising from poor maintenance, old technology, and poor demand-side and lifecycle management”

“Measures to reduce poor systemic performance can be designed to reduce vulnerabilities to weather-related catastrophes, and vice versa”

“need to design infrastructure projects that are optimized according to a set of local criteria.”

“bottom-up work on GHG mitigation also provided opportunities to pilot a variety of new financial instruments, such as green bonds, revolving loan funds, consumer financing of household energy efficiency and renewable installations, tradable renewable energy certificates, feed-in tariffs, etc”
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