Urban Adaptation: The City Water Resilience Approach

As cities continue to grow, increasing demands are being placed on urban water systems. Climate change and other unprecedented stressors will exacerbate the challenges related to cities' climate security in the decades to come. How can cities learn to build resilience, and do so in an equitable manner involving a wide range of stakeholders? For this episode of ClimateReady, we hit the road to conduct live interviews during World Water Week in Stockholm in 2019. Keeping in line with the conference’s theme of “Water for Society: Including All,” we spoke with representatives of the ongoing City Water Resilience Approach (CWRA) project. The approach is designed to coordinate policies, investments, and operations by using water as the connective tissue for resilient action, often across a number of cities that form a single urban landscape. We were joined by two members of the CWRA team from the global engineering firm Arup, Mr. Martin Shouler and Ms. Louise Ellis. Then to hear how the resilience approach is being put into practice in one of its pilot cities, we spoke with Mr. Hardeep Anand of the Miami Dade Water & Sewer Department in the US state of Florida, a city which is seeing quite significant climate impacts already. We wrap up with another “Climate of Hope” story as part of an ongoing collaboration with the World Youth Parliament for Water. Joyce Mendez of the Climate Reality Project in Brazil and the Center for United Nations Constitutional Research covers the ways in which climate change can serve as an opportunity for significant global governance changes as part of a more inclusive future. Links: https://www.resilienceshift.org/campaign/city-water-resilience-approach/ https://www.arup.com/perspectives/city-water-resilience-approach