It has only been a few years since 100RC was established. Changes such as infrastructure improvements usually take far longer to come to fruition. But thanks to the core concept of introducing a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) for cities, Berkowitz can already point to examples of early success.
“We’ve seen cities win big competitive awards on the back of their strategies and the strength of their CROs. In Norfolk, Virginia, for example, the CRO came home with the single largest grant ever awarded to the city, of US$120 million.”
Berkowitz is also seeing partners collaborate in different, meaningful ways. “Swiss Re, the reinsurer, and Veolia, the French infrastructure giant, are working to fund improvements in the New Orleans water system. That partnership came directly out of this engagement. Those are the kind of innovative solutions we’re hoping to be able to bring to cities.”
Sharing successes across the 100RC network – and beyond
While individual successes are good, for lasting results to be achieved, some common success factors need to be identified and then shared.
Forging common approaches across a global network of cities is one of 100RC’s biggest challenges. How are they tackling it?
“At times it’s painful, because cities want to do things their own way,” Berkowitz says. “But one of the ways that we’ve been able to get this collaboration going is to make them go through a similar process. That allows them to have experiences to compare. So where you get, say, 12 CROs together who have all gone through a similar process, all using the same terminology, all framing resilience in basically the same way, it’s really powerful. That’s when the network really starts to pop.”
If [cities] start to organize in similar ways, we can scale solutions and really start to move the needle.
Common approaches also help prepare the pitch for the private sector partners to apply their solutions across different cities. “If cities are all bespoke, it’s much harder to enter that ecosystem. If they start to organize in similar ways, we can scale solutions and really start to move the needle and fix cities in powerful ways,” Berkowitz says.
And the 100RC approach to risk and resilience is already spreading. “Other cities that aren’t in the network are copying the model,” Berkowitz says. “We’ve seen cities naming their own chief resilience officers and adopting this idea of holistic resilience. So the fact that it’s spreading even without us having to do that is amazing.
“The goal is not to change 100 cities – the goal is to change every city around the world.”
Summary
100RC reaches across a global network of cities to forge common approaches, extend solutions and fix cities in powerful ways.
