Urban Climate Resilience
Building urban resilience to climate change by helping cities address their climate risks and vulnerabilities

The Urban Climate Resilience practice area represents the intersection between WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and World Resources Institute’s Climate Resilience Practice. We work with cities to identify their climate risks and vulnerabilities, and we help leaders and citizens take action to make their cities more resilient.

Building resilience to climate change is complex, particularly for rapidly growing cities. The impacts of climate change vary greatly among different cities due to physical factors like local geography and environment as well as a host of social, political, and economic factors, rooted in systemic inequalities.

Despite these challenges, cities around the globe have reached a tipping point, and resilience is solidly on many of their agendas. We collaborate with a range of stakeholders at multiple scales in cities across the world to identify influential avenues within the following t categories:

  • Developing innovative ways for cities to build resilience
  • Helping cities measure and track community and individual resilience.
  • Integrating resilience into city master plans and development plans
  • Integrating resilience into sector-specific plans or projects

Urban Climate Resilience Facts

  1. Half of the global population currently lives in cities. By 2050, this is expected to increase to 70 percent, with much of the growth occurring in Asian cities and cities that currently have less than 500,000 inhabitants.
  2. Due to climate change, hundreds of millions of people in urban areas across the world will experience rising sea levels, inland floods, more frequent and intense storms, and more frequent periods of extreme heat and cold in the coming years.
  3. Slum dwellers in developing countries tend to be most vulnerable to climate change because they live along river banks, on slopes prone to landslides, near polluted grounds, on desertified land, in unstable structures, and along coastal waterfronts.
  4. Many cities have not yet addressed climate risks due to lack of relevant city policies and action plans, outmoded regulations on urban planning, lack of capacity to respond to climate disasters, and lack of public awareness.

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