Today so much is written about “resilience” that it has become a buzz word – an idea that sounds good in theory – but what does it mean in practice for rapidly growing urban areas?

The Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) defines resilience as “the ability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through survival, adaptability, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change.”

In 2012, USAID released its Building Resilience to Recurrent Crisis Policy and Program Guidance, in which the agency defined resilience as “the ability of people, households, communities, countries, and systems to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth.” Last year the agency also released a new policy, Sustainable Service Delivery in an Increasingly Urbanized World, in which it hones in on the concept of municipal resilience in two broad areas: local self-sufficiency through improved revenue generation and financial transparency, and “climate proof” urban services in coastal areas that are vulnerable to flooding, storm surges and sea level rise.

The threat of sea level rise is a looming reality for low-lying coastal municipalities worldwide. In the United States, south Florida, New York City and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia are particularly vulnerable. In the developing world, especially in South and Southeast Asia, cities like Dhaka, Bangladesh Ho Chi Minh City, and Bangkok are projected to suffer some of the worst losses due to rising sea levels in the coming decades. And the latest report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes clear that this and other impacts of climate change are irreversible due to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions already emitted into the atmosphere. In other words, even if we found a way to shut down all the coal-fired power plants and stopped driving our cars tomorrow, the seas would keep rising. If we continue with the current level of emissions, impacts such as sea level rise will intensify.

CityLinks exchange participants in Durban

So how do low-lying coastal municipalities plan for the inevitability of rising seas, storm surges and flooding? This is a question that many people are asking, but one that surprisingly few cities are taking tangible action to address, particularly in the United States. An exception is in Florida, where Fort Lauderdale and Broward County have been implementing technical and policy solutions to address climate change via the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact. With the support of various local, regional, state and federal agencies, the Compact have developed a technical foundation for regional climate issues including a unified sea level rise projection and a sea level rise vulnerability assessment.

Since 2013, Broward County and Fort Lauderdale have collaborated with Durban, South Africa through the CityLinks Durban/Southeast Florida Climate Change Partnership. During a March 2014 exchange trip, visitors from Durban took an in-depth look at the technical and policy solutions Fort Lauderdale and Broward County are implementing to address sea level rise and other impacts of climate change.

The CityLinks program also worked to address issue of municipal climate resilience with the Climate Leadership Academy (CLA) on urban climate adaptation in 2013 in Jakarta, Indonesia. The CLA aimed to accelerate and advance urban climate adaptation activities in select cities in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region. Teams of climate adaptation practitioners from eight cities created a three-month Action Plan focused on 1) establishing or strengthening working groups; 2) developing or refining strategic plans for urban climate adaptation; 3) developing or enhancing climate data and vulnerability assessments; 4) engaging citizens, stakeholders, and technical resources; and 5) restoring ecosystem services. The CityLinks team collected feedback and data that indicated significant improvements in the capacity of participating cities to reduce their vulnerability and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Through a “peer learning” approach, the CLA uncovered a diversity of urban climate adaptation priorities. For instance, Legazpi, Philippines has focused closely on preparing for climate-related events such as flooding, sea-level rise, and tsunamis, while others, such as Jakarta, Indonesia have prioritized working with highly adaptive coastal slum dwellers to inform their overall zoning codes.

While there is an incredible amount of work to be done to prepare low-lying coastal cities for the impacts of climate change, the CityLinks program has shown that one way to make progress towards to goal of municipal resilience if through city-to-city knowledge sharing. ICMA and its CityLinks partners look forward to exchanging knowledge and ideas from an urban perspective, and implementing future initiatives that help advance this and other core principles of USAID’s Sustainable Service Delivery in an Increasingly Urbanized World policy.