Mayors pledge 10 percent of budget to resilience strategies

Twenty-one mayors have pledged US$5.2 billion to fund resilience strategies by signing up to the 10% Resilience Pledge at the COP21 conference in Paris this week.

Mayors from cities such as Mexico City, New Orleans, Paris and Rio de Janeiro will dedicate the equivalent of 10 percent of their city’s annual budget towards defined, resilience-building activities throughout their term in office.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu commented: “A resilient city must not only be prepared to address the environmental challenges that the world is facing, but also the longstanding, generational issues around crime, education and income inequality so that no one is left behind.”

The 100 Resilient Cities campaign (100RC, a Rockefeller Foundation initiative) does not ask cities’ to pledge additional resources but helps them fund and plan strategies that will make them more resilient. All resilience projects must accomplish more than one goal with a single intervention to qualify for the pledge. The campaign believes this forces cities to think more efficiently about resilience.

For example, one of the major goals of New Orleans’ resilience strategy is to improve resilience to climate change. To do this, it needed engineers. It also has a problem with high unemployment, so it teamed up with Delgado University to train several thousand new engineers, solving two problems with one initiative.

The 100RC definition of resilience includes not just the shocks—like earthquakes, fires and floods–but also city stresses that occur on a daily basis. This might mean high unemployment, an overtaxed or inefficient public transportation system, endemic violence or chronic food and water shortages. The campaign argues that addressing these issues should help cities to attract more investment as better places to work and live.

100RC provides all the cities that have signed up to the pledge with the resources to hire a resilience officer and plan a resilience strategy. This is an extensive process, which could take up to nine months, and will involve all city stakeholders in a plan that ticks the dual or triple purpose boxes laid out by the campaign.

The 21 cities to have signed up at COP21 are: Accra, Ghana; Amman, Jordan; Athens, Greece; Berkeley, California (US); Bristol, UK; Boulder, Colorado (US); Byblos, Lebanon; Cali, Colombia; Huangshi, China; Kigali, Rwanda; Mexico City, Mexico; New Orleans, Louisiana (US); Norfolk, Virginia (US); Oakland, California (US); Paris, France; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (US); Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Santa Fe, Argentina; Toyama, Japan; and Tulsa, Oklahoma (US).