Urban Resilience: 2020 Urban Learning Brief for Mission Staff

As cities around the world face more acute climate events, global pandemics, humanitarian crises and other shocks, there is rapidly growing attention on the need for urban resilience. There is an urgency to act quickly. The World Bank estimates that by 2030 there will be $300 billion in annual average losses and 77 million urban residents will fall back into poverty without significant risk reduction to avoid those setbacks.

Urban resilience is defined by 100 Resilient Cities as “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.”

USAID’s investments in building resilience help share and shift the responsibility for managing risk, investing in resilience, and responding to shocks from donors to governments, communities, and the private sector. The overriding aim is to reduce costs of recurrent crises and get ahead of emerging risks to prevent backsliding on development gains.