Optimize for Resilience: Cities Coordinate 4 Key Elements During Urban Resilience Planning and Implementation
From wildfires in Hawaii, to water shortages in the Colorado River Basin, to floods in California and New England, hurricanes in the southeast, severe weather in the central U.S., and more frequent damaging storms across the country, the news is filled with weather and climate related disasters. In the first 9 months of 2023 alone there have been 23 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Cities around the globe are racing to improve their resilience and adapt to climate-related challenges such as sea level rise, heat island effect, biodiversity loss, and more frequent floods and intense storms. Building resilience requires looking at the most vulnerable components of a community, using an equity lens that focuses particular attention on how historical injustices exacerbate economic, environmental, health, and social risk factors.
Climate and equity challenges continue to grow and require huge amounts of capital and coordination to address through a combination of adaptation and mitigation efforts. Too often, conversations about how to pay for resilience initiatives are delayed until the tail end of resilience strategy development, which may be too late to make program development decisions that can unlock additional funding and financing.
This results in little to no community engagement on the financial tools to be used, and a reliance on a cookie-cutter approach of using state and federal grants that are highly competitive and can be difficult to access. Because city budgets and state/federal grant programs are and will continue to be unable to meet the full need for coastal and inland climate adaptation, innovative financing and creative capital stacks are essential to build durable, effective, and intersectional resilience.
A new approach is emerging, which incorporates layered funding and financing to build a diverse capital stack and governance models that encourage partnerships. This enables cities to engage public and private sector actors with a shared focus on outcomes achievement to meet short- and long-term capital and design needs. Pairing that approach with thoughtful community engagement, city leaders can advance climate resilience projects that also achieve community-informed co-benefits like economic development, health equity, and affordable housing.
Take the case of Seattle. Quantified Ventures is supporting the Duwamish Valley Program, a collaboration of the Office of Sustainability & Environment, Seattle Public Utilities, the Office of Planning & Community Development, and other City of Seattle departments in its efforts to establish a Resilience District in the Georgetown and South Park neighborhoods.
The Duwamish Valley Resilience District is a geographic strategy focused on adapting to climate change impacts (such as flood risk) by centering the voices of those most affected by health inequities, racial disparities, and climate change as part of a community-led, cross-sector, interdisciplinary governance structure to ensure residents, workers, and businesses can be healthy and thrive in place despite climate change.
Life expectancy in Georgetown and South Park is 8 years lower than the average for Seattle residents. The two neighborhoods are predominantly minority, with 70% of the residents identifying as a person of color. QV is working to develop a strategy to finance/fund sea level rise adaptation infrastructure with the objective of improved health, equity, and wealth building outcomes for residents in the Duwamish Valley.
From Seattle to St. Petersburg, and everywhere in between, we must work to evolve how cities plan and pay for climate, environmental justice, and economic revitalization projects.
We have identified 4 key elements that urban areas need to parallel process and optimize to effectively manage resilience planning and implementation.
Community Engagement + Equity: harness local knowledge and build local capacity
Financing + Funding: plan for how to pay for resilience early and re-evaluate often to produce the best results
Governance + Partnerships: cross-sector partnerships and novel governance structures unlock new opportunities
Infrastructure Design + Engineering: design projects like your community depends on it (because the community does)
Let’s look at how these 4 key elements to urban resilience planning and implementation interact and overlap.
Community Engagement + Equity
Community outreach that centers equity is essential for the project to lead to holistic resilience to the physical, economic, and societal impacts of climate change.
Often, community engagement is viewed as an add-on, or a box-checking exercise, rather than a central tenet to resilience planning. To develop an urban resilience strategy that is accountable, adaptable, anti-displacement, and data-informed, it is critical to center community perspectives and prioritize environmental justice.
The Seattle Duwamish Valley Resilience District created an Advisory Group of community members to provide feedback throughout strategy development - with stipend compensation for members to equitably account for their time - and hosted public multi-lingual community workshops to explain the sea level rise planning. The project team does broad community engagement to garner feedback on Advisory Group input; during their first round of information sharing the team heard from more than 240 community members.
City leaders must balance their technocratic knowledge about possibilities with on-the-ground community needs and wants. Local administrators should think nationally, then act locally when it comes to applying best practices to support their city’s resilience and equity strategy implementation.
The municipalities leading the way in resilience planning and implementation are able to integrate plans across communities, disciplines, and organizational siloes. Cities that build infrastructure with relevant input from local environmental, public health, and social sector leaders (and funders) can ensure that the outcomes are aligned with community interests and can build resilience beyond the physical impacts of climate change by delivering recreational, employment, and health benefits.
Of course, all this means that while there are best practices in equitable urban resilience planning, the implementation approaches will differ across cities and regions, as the local context, history, and community priorities are integrated into plans.
Financing + Funding
City budgets that are already stretched thin in the face of existing challenges are unable to cover the cost of adaptation.
The influx of federal funding for infrastructure and resilience – including DOT, EPA, FEMA, and NOAA grants – presents an opportunity, albeit not a permanent solution. Cities must position themself to be competitive for currently available funds, leverage their municipal budgets to extend their reach, and have sustainable plans for enduring capacity once these funds expire.
Cities at the forefront of resilience planning are engaging the philanthropic and private sectors to develop scalable and enduring funding models that leverage other sources of capital to unlock public funding. This is done with the recognition that the once-in-a-generation influx of federal funds can’t sustain the growing and evolving need for capital to support the administration, installation, and maintenance of climate infrastructure.
An outcomes-driven approach – such as Environmental Impact Bonds – can bring together new partners, align parties on achieving impact metrics, realize the full value of a project’s benefits, and focus on continuous improvement to achieve durable results through performance-based incentives.
Evaluating tools like land value capture, to realize the benefits of this infrastructure may result in revenues or higher asset values for community stakeholders.
Local Improvement Districts and Tax Increment Financing are two geographically bounded mechanisms for capturing increasing land values from infrastructure investments. These financing tools, along with exactions and construction permit trading, can recapture revenues and be used to repay upfront financing. The South Lake Union Streetcar in Seattle and the Atlanta Beltline TIF are two examples of how these mechanisms have been deployed.
Fee collection through exactions, as done by the Boston Public Development Authority in the Seaport District, can repay upfront financing for infrastructure that will benefit long-term tenants.
Markets and auctions can be created to commoditize and raise revenue from tangible or intangible assets, such as carbon credits or construction permits. In Sao Paolo, Brazil, an auction of building elevation permits generated more than $800 million in revenue that was used to build resilient infrastructure in disadvantaged communities.
Governance + Partnerships
Cross-disciplinary systems thinking is key to effectively building urban resilience. Resilience leaders need to consider how to bring in diverse perspectives to inform decision-making. As an example, investments in making neighborhoods safer and greener can lead to higher property values and cause displacement.
How a resilience district is established and what authorities it has can greatly influence what funding and financing mechanisms are available. The Resilience Authority of Anne Arundel and Annapolis was enabled by Maryland state legislation that granted it bonding capacity, with decision-making led by a county and city appointed board. In New Orleans, the city created the Gentilly Resilience District with the support of federal funds, though the resilience district coordinates with and leverages efforts of local partners like the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and Sewerage & Water Board of New Orleans.
Resilience and sustainability officers need to actively engage, partner with, and incorporate elements from related disciplines such as affordable housing, multi-modal transport, clean energy, economic development, water resource management, parks departments, and workforce agencies. Philanthropic and private sector actors that have shared economic, environmental, health, and social impact goals can be valuable partners. Consider whether, in your local context, additional entities with different authorities and abilities are needed to advance your regional resilience goals.
Infrastructure Design + Engineering
Urban planners often have the opportunity to incorporate community amenities, such as stormwater parks, into multi-benefit infrastructure. Meaningfully engaging the community and local partners in design will engender local support, can help identify new capital sources for projects, and can help limit displacement as the urban revival comes to fruition.
Incorporating natural infrastructure and stormwater management components can make infrastructure projects eligible for Clean Water State Revolving Funds, which can provide low-cost public financing.
Inclusive planning helps ensure that target investments focus on areas of critical economic and social infrastructure and have an equity component.
Where possible, infrastructure should be designed to include layered benefits. For example, land acquired to account for storm surge could serve as a stormwater park, so that on days without flooding it can provide a community amenity and serve an ecological function as habitat for native species and carbon sequestration.
Including commercial and residential needs throughout is essential to build a thriving neighborhood, such as by designing for pedestrian and multi-modal transportation alongside commercial transit. This approach supports place-making and strengthens holistic community resilience.
In summary, cities that plan together (and center equity), grow and thrive together.
If you are a municipality, urban planner, or city-lover working to build resilience in your region, we want to hear from – and work with – you! Quantified Ventures brings valuable national experience in the realms of Financing + Funding and Governance + Partnerships. Contact me to share your experience and provide feedback on this blog!