It’s 2009. The world has failed to reach a meaningful international climate agreement at COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Despite increased climate action, cities and regions are increasingly feeling the effects of climate change. Mitigation alone is not enough – cities and regions around the world need to build resilience.
Responding to this need, ICLEI launched the Resilient Cities Congress series in 2010 in Bonn, Germany, bringing local resilience to a world stage for the first time.
The ten-year legacy of the Resilient Cities Congress has been captured in a new report, Resilient cities, thriving cities: The evolution of urban resilience, released on November 20, 2019.
This report uses the decade-long experience of the Resilient Cities Congress series as a proxy to track the evolution of the global resilience debate over the last ten years, creating a solid base to build the next decade of bold action.
It explores a variety of resilience approaches; for example, how multi-stakeholder planning has contributed to finance and boosted local resilience, or how leveraging nature-based solutions has enabled cities’ adaptation to climate change and improved people’s quality of life.
The report also provides successful examples of social cohesion benefiting physical resilience, especially in informal settlements.