Recent flooding in India, Germany and China, as well as heatwaves and wildfires in Greece and North America, have highlighted climate extremes. In an article for the World Economic Forum, Niels Holm-Nielsen, the Head of the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), writes that “we urgently need a solution to the climate crisis”. The GFDRR highlights that cities are a strong place to start thanks to their concentration of useful resources.
According to the article, cities are “engines of economic development, hubs of culture and innovation”. They also have a high concentration of assets and people, including some of the “best brains, institutions, and the most financial resources”. Based on these factors, cities can generate solutions for the climate crisis.
Ways to get started, says Holm-Nielson, include empowering urban youth with technology skills to produce hyper-local information that can enable better planning and investments across services and functions. Furthermore, cities can influence new development in ways that “consider the physical risks of a changing climate and are aligned with low-carbon growth strategies”.
To ensure that any plans become actionable, cities must invest in zoning and code enforcement, says GFDRR. According to the article, GFDRR offers a suite of programs and tools to help cities improve and enforce their resilience planning.
