100 Resilient Cities Effort Adds Private Sector Partners
Today at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, Dr. Judith Rodin announced that 100 Resilient Cities – Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation (100RC) has four new global private sector partners joining its efforts to build urban resilience in cities around the world. AkzoNobel, The Nature Conservancy, Risk Management Solutions, and Veolia will join 100RC’s “Platform Partners,” a group of organizations from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Platform Partners provide critical tools to help cities around the world become more resilient to the shocks and stresses that are a growing part of the 21st century.
“Building resilience and enabling cities to better prepare for and recover from the shocks and stresses they will surely face has never been more urgent,” said Dr. Judith Rodin, President of The Rockefeller Foundation. “The expanded commitment of 100 Resilient Cities, with the four new platform partners, is a testament to a shared and growing vision for responding to this urgency around the world.”
“We’re excited to welcome our four new partners to 100 Resilient Cities,” said Michael Berkowitz, president of 100 Resilient Cities. “Not only will our four new partners help provide resilience tools to our network cities, they will help absorb information from those cities and inform the market. 100 Resilient Cities is seeking to help the market understand what cities need and react, thereby helping to scale solutions that can be used around the world. These new partners will help us do just that.”
“Partnering with The Rockefeller Foundation and 100 Resilient Cities is a natural fit for AkzoNobel, following the launch of our Human Cities initiative in June,” said AkzoNobel CEO Ton Büchner. “It offers further proof of our serious commitment to tackling the many challenges being faced by some of the world’s biggest urban areas. As an industry leader with operations in 80 countries, we are uniquely positioned to play a key role in building resilient cities across the globe, both in terms of physically safeguarding infrastructure and creating a stronger sense of community, identity and belonging.”
“Providing growing cities with water, energy, and food while protecting them from extreme weather requires re-envisioning almost every aspect of urban infrastructure. Nature offers solutions for cities that are elegant and cost effective at exactly the moment when solutions are needed,” said Glenn Prickett, Vice President of External Affairs for the Nature Conservancy. As urban populations continue to increase and cities define how most people live and use natural resources, The Nature Conservancy looks forward to working with 100 Resilient Cities as a Platform Partner where we will deploy our unique capacity and help cities invest in natural infrastructure to address their resilience challenges.”
“Enabling societal resilience is at the core of RMS’s business,” said Paul VanderMarck, chief products officer at RMS. “By providing our models and technology to cities in the 100 Resilient Cities program, we can help them better understand their catastrophe risk and increase their resilience. As a company headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are pleased that San Francisco will be the first city to use our models and technology and we are looking forward to working with other cities around the world, including those who are at an earlier stage in their efforts to quantify their risk and take steps to prepare for future events.”
AkzoNobel is developing an urban resilience guide for cities, with an emphasis on how paints, coatings and chemicals can build both “hard” and “soft” resilience into city systems. For example, color is essential to creating a sense of community and identity, and AkzoNobel will be providing guidance on using color in urban spaces. Furthermore, the guide includes findings from a research report on the use of coatings for heritage preservation. AkzoNobel will carry out projects in at least four cities in the 100RC Network. Each project will explore the contribution of color and coatings to a particular aspect of resilience: from improving public health to protecting urban heritage, from community identity to economic prosperity, from education to social connection, and from reliable mobility to improving infrastructure efficiency. The company will work closely with 100RC to identify cities for these projects.
The Nature Conservancy will provide technical advice on natural infrastructure to cities in the 100RC Network. TNC is 100RC’s first environmental Platform Partner, and will provide cities with innovative decision-support tools to help address a wide variety of resilience challenges. TNC will feature all 100 member cities in their Water Risk and Solutions assessment, an effort to map cities’ source watersheds, intake and storage capacities, as well as assessing cities’ water risks and drivers, such as population growth and climate change. The assessment includes an online platform which will identify conservation-based strategies (i.e. reforestation, natural land protection, forest fuel reduction, etc.) to mitigate water risks. TNC will continue to add new tools for cities to use, and work with select member cities to plan and implement freshwater and coastal resilience interventions.
Risk Management Solutions is offering the use of their RMS(one) exposure and risk management platform, in addition to the use of relevant RMS catastrophe models on RMS(one) for a period of five years. RMS will work with 100RC member cities to deliver the services, which will enable cities to better understand, manage, and respond to catastrophic events by creating a system of record for exposure data that can be improved and updated over time. This service allows cities to not only run catastrophe models to gauge expected damages and casualties in the future, but also to run post-event analyses to estimate losses and prioritize emergency response activities. Cities can also create “what-if” scenarios so they can determine the benefits of potential mitigation investments.
Lastly, Veolia is sharing best practices, and providing guidance and preliminary coaching to member cities on water supply management, sanitation, energy and waste management, and valorization.  Veolia has partnerships with hundreds of diverse cities around the world, and believes that sharing best practices can turn resilience challenges into opportunities for improved and environmentally friendlier social and economic urban development.
These tools will be made available to members of 100RC’s Network, and will be used to help design and implement the cities’ long term resilience plan. Platform partners are a vital component of 100RC’s efforts, both helping provide cities with tools they need to build resilience, and also influencing the market as other resilience tools are developed. Platform partners are from the private sector, public sector, NGO, and academic community.
Platform partners are dedicated to providing 100RC Network cities with solutions that integrate Big Data, Analytics, Technology, resilience land use planning, infrastructure design, and new financing and insuring products. Other 100RC platform partners include Swiss Re, Palantir, the World Bank, Architecture for Humanity the American Institute of Architects, and Sandia National Laboratories.
100 Resilient Cities — Pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation is financially supported by The Rockefeller Foundation and managed as a sponsored project by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides governance and operational infrastructure to its sponsored projects. 100RC seeks to help cities around the world build resilience to the shocks and stresses – which particularly impact the poor and vulnerable – that are increasingly part of 21st century life.
Learn more about 100RC at www.100resilientcities.org, RPA at www.rockpa.org, the Rockefeller Foundation at www.rockefellerfoundation.org/about-us, and the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) at www.clintonglobalinitiative.org.
