Resilient together

Climate resilience requires unprecedented collaboration between governments, the private sector and communities. Cities are pivotal. Brendon Baker and Nikki van Dijk explain why.

All over the world, rural to urban migration and population growth are causing cities to grow. More people, more buildings and more infrastructure face more extreme weather. How big is the challenge?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that 3.3bn people already live in “contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change,” most of them in cities. At the end of October the United Nations Environment Programme warned that “the world is on track for a temperature rise of between 2.4°C and 2.6°C by the end of this century.” If countries fulfil their current carbon reduction pledges and fulfil further proposed commitments, under the best-case scenario, global warming can be halted at 1.8°C. “So there is hope. However, this scenario is not currently credible based on the discrepancy between current emissions, short-term targets and long-term net-zero targets.”

The world has warmed by 1°C since the pre-industrial era, and extreme weather events are on a rising trajectory. In June 2022, a third of Pakistan was underwater. The country’s government called the flooding caused by extreme monsoon rainfall “a climate dystopia at our doorstep.”. More than 1,700 people died in the flooding and 33M people were affected – one in seven Pakistanis. The economic toll is estimated at $40bn.

Meanwhile, the UK recorded its hottest ever temperatures, topping 40.2°C. It caused 2,803 excess deaths (deaths above the long-term average for the same period), the highest heat related excess mortality figure since 2004, when planning for heatwaves was first introduced.

City authorities and private companies cannot afford to wait for infrastructure and services to fail. Rebuilding and restoring after a single event might be possible, but widespread or repeated impacts will potentially cause social, economic and environmental losses too great to recover from.

A proactive approach

On Friday 11 November the Summary for Urban Policymakers (SUP) launched a series of major reports, which present IPCC assessments and findings to cities and businesses in clear language. The SUP series is the product of collaboration between IPCC report authors acting in an independent capacity and practitioners from all over the world, and puts essential information and guidance into the hands of decision-makers.

Mott MacDonald shared expertise in urban resilience with the SUP author team. We also worked with industry partners to produce the SUP Action Agenda, setting out ways to co-create scalable solutions.

The SUP makes clear that systems thinking is essential, as infrastructure and city functions are so interconnected. In 2019 we produced a report on behalf of the Net-Zero Infrastructure Industry Coalition, identifying a four-pillar strategy for achieving net-zero carbon, focused on powers, partnerships, data platforms, and people. Those same pillars also enable resilience. This is how.

Powers: a remit for local action

City authorities have convening power. They can bring together organisations and communities and take a leading role in bridging differences in position and outlook to reach consensus. Every city and neighbourhood is different, requiring tailored resilience measures. They will be most effective with strong local engagement, and the mobilisation of local resources. Empowering governments, civil society and the private sector is essential. If they have a mandate to implement locally applicable solutions, cities can prioritise risk reduction, equity, inclusion, and justice.

Partnerships: collaboration for better outcomes

Public and private sector actors are individually addressing the physical impacts of climate change. But alone they cannot fully achieve resilience, because the risk is too large and complex. Engagement and collaboration between organisations is necessary.

Partnerships are at the core of the SUP initiative, which encourages and enables solutions to be co-created and actioned collaboratively. This greatly increases the scale, comprehensiveness and practicality of solutions to achieve resilience, whether by building new defensive infrastructure or adapting existing assets. It also improves the range of co-benefits, delivering better value for money.

Investors are increasingly concerned about resilience – they want assurance that they will not lose capital due to the physical impacts of climate change, and are also becoming interested in resilience projects as an allied area for investment. However, until recently there has not been a clear approach for assessing infrastructure assets’ exposure to climate risk.

This challenge is being met head-on by the Coalition for Climate Resilience (CCRI), representing many of the world’s leading financial, legal and infrastructure companies, governments, civil society organisations and academia. With support from Mott MacDonald, CCRI has developed the Physical Climate Risk Assessment Methodology (PCRAM), to enable asset owners, operators, investors and other stakeholders – including city leaders – to assess and understand the exposure of infrastructure assets to the physical impacts of climate change, and to develop and prioritise adaptation measures.

Data platforms: decision-making, planning and implementation

That climate change is happening is certain. Exactly what impacts it will bring is not. Therefore planning adaptive pathways must account for multiple plausible scenarios. All too often at present, lack of comprehensive data is cited as a reason not to plan for climate change. This is rarely a robust excuse. Even sparse data aids understanding of how resilience options will respond to different future scenarios. The IPCC’s sixth assessment report, published in 2022, provides a strong platform on which city-scale adaptation plans can be developed.

Cities are a nexus for society, business, policy and climate science. Collectively, we should work towards the best – limiting climate change by reducing carbon emissions as far and as fast as possible.

Brendon Baker

Built environment account lead

Digital modelling and analysis solutions aided by machine learning are increasingly being used to generate new insights from available data, and improve decision-making. For example, in Bangkok, Thailand, flood warnings can be issued in near real time using one of our digital solutions Moata Smart Water. Smart Water combines data from meteorological reports and from water flow and level gauges on key sewers and drainage canals. Modelling enables city authorities to anticipate flooding and issue pre-emptive warnings; it also enables authorities to rapidly mobilise emergency services to affected areas. The solution was developed as part of the Global Future Cities Programme, funded by the UK Foreign,

Commonwealth and Development Office, and for which we are lead delivery partner in South East Asia.

People: harnessing knowledge, and building capability and capacity

People in local communities, with local understanding, don’t always have a voice in, or influence over, decisions that affect them. This results in missed opportunities to realise social, economic and environmental co-benefits, and at worst can result in the delivery of solutions that are unsustainable. Global communication and social media provide citizens, governments, professionals and politicians with unprecedented capacity to learn about climate change, call for action, and support climate justice for vulnerable communities. Alongside engagement methodologies such as FUTURES, the scenario planning and decision-making toolkit developed by Mott MacDonald and the University of the West of England, communication and social media can also be harnessed to gain local and indigenous communities’ experience and insight. In any context, community engagement produces solutions that work best and deliver greatest possible value for all.

The growing global focus on equity and justice is important, and there is a long way to go to achieve it. Cities in the global south are the world’s fastest growing, but also bear the brunt of climate impacts. Resilience is severely under-resourced. Worldwide, climate action is under-financed. Climate finance for resilience is a small fraction of finance for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. And the global south receives much less than the north.

This can only be addressed by improving investors’ and governments’ capability and capacity to deliver resilience solutions – by equipping people with the requisite skills. These include risk assessment, project shaping and definition, business case development, procurement, project management, governance and assurance.

Informing action

The SUP makes climate science available more easily available to all involved in making decisions about planning, building and managing cities and all the assets from which they are made. It calls for collaboration to solve the large, complex challenges of creating resilience. And it is clear that working with local communities, drawing on their knowledge and empowering them, presents the biggest opportunity for delivering socially inclusive and sustainable outcomes, benefiting communities, investors and government and private owners alike.

The SUP recognises that cities are a nexus for society, business, policy and climate science. Collectively, we should work towards the best – limiting climate change by reducing carbon emissions as far and as fast as possible. And we should prepare for worse. It is time for collaboration, centred around powers, partnerships, data platforms, and people, to make our cities resilient.