City Resilience Index (CRI) Offers Leaders a Comprehensive Analysis of Capabilities and Vulnerabilities
LONDON—Today, The Rockefeller Foundation and Arup introduced the City Resilience Index (CRI), the first-ever comprehensive tool to help cities assess their resilience, identify their vulnerabilities, and better prepare themselves for the future.
The CRI is a powerful, tested tool created to help policy-makers, urban planners and stakeholders understand and tackle the systemic challenges that increasingly threaten cities. Comprising 52 resilience indicators, the CRI assesses key resilience qualities such as diversity, awareness, and self-regulation, that are critically important to building resilience within a city. The CRI gives cities the ability to assess their preparedness and ability to accommodate current and emerging challenges, through a secure online interface through which cities can enter their data. Each city’s findings can guide urban policymaking, planning, and investment.
“Cities increasingly understand that building resilience is a 21st century imperative, and now for the first time they have a way to comprehensively assess where they are strong, and where they need to improve to be ready for whatever may come their way,” said Judith Rodin, President of The Rockefeller Foundation, which supported Arup to develop the CRI. “The CRI was created over three years and in consultation with a range of cities globally. It is designed with rigor, and in a way that cities everywhere will benefit from using it as a planning and decision-making tool, that can help them realize a resilience dividend from investments in their growth and the well-being of their citizens,” added Rodin.
Designed primarily as a self-assessment, this tool will generate a resilience profile that will reveal a city’s specific strengths and weaknesses, creating a baseline to plan from and measure future progress against.
“Every city is unique, and each faces specific challenges. But, the factors that enable cities to deal with disruption are universal,” said Jo da Silva, Director, Arup. “The CRI captures the breadth of issues that contribute to a city’s resilience. It provides a practical means to measure resilience, and a common language that will enable cities to learn from each other.”
“The City Resilience Index represents an important advancement in assessing resilience, providing a new opportunity for cities, through an analysis of real data, to better assess what their resilience capabilities are,” said Michael Berkowitz, President of 100 Resilient Cities, Pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation.
For more information on the City Resilience Index, please visit: www.cityresilienceindex.org.