We should talk about resilience

The European Urban Resilience Forum took place in Athens on 14th and 15th September 2022, gathering city representatives, experts and local and regional stakeholders from all over Europe. It was a space to reflect and develop collaborative strategies on climate change adaptation, building urban resilience and managing disasters. This year, the conference focused on multiple topics, including heatwaves and wildfires, coastal resilience, building regional pathways for resilience transformation, nature-based solutions and many more. In this article, I will briefly reflect on key learnings and challenges that emerge from the presentations and discussions of the Forum.

The starting point

The ice-breaker questions of the session about “How is your city adapting?” organised by the European Environment Agency aimed to reflect on policies and practices for building resilience: how far do we stand in implementing climate adaptation strategies in cities? What are the main issues that are holding us back, and what good examples can we share of how to overcome them? Different good examples and successful cases of climate change adaptation strategies and actions to mitigate the impact of disasters, including heatwaves and coastal related events, were presented during the conference. However, the discussion went well beyond the so-called good practices and remarked on the need to share and reflect on the failures.

The conference also included three workshops on key topics such as nature-based solutions, pathways for post-war recovery as well as transformational pathways for building resilience. The latter touched a key aspect for wider spreading the resilience paradigm: how to replicate innovative approaches for a resilient Europe? If we aim at a European goal of resilience by 2050, we should start to investigate and gather insights on how to ensure replication of innovative solutions. In the roundtables we have discussed different aspects of replication, including the need to understand local context, the role of shared standards as well as the need of a multistakeholder commitment, with prevailing role of policymakers in prioritising the topic in the agenda.

Probably one of the most stunning moments of the Forum was the speech of the Mayor of Athens, who presented a narrative on adverse events and resilience by putting himself in the shoes of the population: could you imagine a grandmother going for groceries shop in the middle of a heatwave? How do we ensure we create necessary protective measure for a construction worker when temperatures go well over 40 degrees Celsius? While we should develop efficient mitigation strategies, we should keep our focus on the underlying inequities, and mainly, on the differences of our citizens. We should understand the stories of real people, which seems to be still a challenge for policy development.

Hubs as collaborative spaces

No single government, non-for-profit or business can pretend to act alone to address increasingly complex challenges. When a crisis happens, it hits us all, either we talk about climate change, a disaster, or a financial hurricane. In other words, we are all in the same boat.

Involving and engaging multiple stakeholders (at local, regional, national, or European level) can contribute to better face these situations. The collaborative approach has been repeatedly proposed as a way to address complex issues and create legitime and shared solutions. For instance, they can contribute to create common understandings of the underlying vulnerabilities of a certain region, or make a proper assessment of shared capacities to prepare and respond to an adverse event. Furthermore, it can be helpful to collect and analyse data that may exceed geographical boundaries by properly articulating efforts of local, regional and national administrations. Even more important, it can help to engage different stakeholders in the process of setting the topic in their private and public agendas as well as finding common solutions for building resilience.

One example presented during the Forum were the Resilience Hubs. As part of the Making Cities Resilient 2030 initiative, the hubs look to enhance city-to-city collaborations and peer-to-peer support along the resilience journey. They have a key role for knowledge sharing, capacity building and creating learning opportunities.

Resilience Hubs must have developed and implemented DRR strategies and plan in alignment with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and contributed to the achievement of the New Urban Agenda, Paris Climate Agreement, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They must have established governance systems with a dedicated department, unit or focal point on resilience or disaster/climate risk reduction, have well-coordinated and engaged multi and diverse stakeholders in the process of developing and implementing DRR/resilience strategies, and have demonstrated a long-term and continuous learning to ensure their cities are becoming safe, sustainable and resilient. Source: Making Cities Resilient 2030

However, one of the key barriers discussed in terms of collaboration is the existing gap between networks of stakeholders (research institutions, non-for-profits, and to a less extent private sector) with policymakers. There is an urgent need for policymakers to commit to invest in developing capacities and reducing vulnerabilities, thus building resilience. In this direction, the mayor of Valencia called for a real transformation in governance models. Indeed, Effective governance is a crucial aspect for the design and implementation of public policies: it refers to the horizontal styles of exchange of technical information and cooperation between the government and different actors in public policy processes. This is what Elinor Ostrom has called Collective Action, useful for the protection of common goods.

A way forward

In a previous blog post, I have discussed about the fact we are facing multiple crises in our world today. The Forum remarked the overlapping characteristics of these multiple crises. Moreover, it highlighted the fact that our mistakes today in properly managing them will be quite costly for future generations. A critical barrier is that while efforts are done, even though they are still limited, they are hardly mainstreamed.

Our way to the future should start on the title of this article: we should talk about resilience. Indeed, the issue of visibility is still crucial: who is working on resilience, who is building practices, developing policies, and acting at local, regional or national level to build a more resilient society? What are we doing to create more visibility?

Probably one of the most difficult issues associated to the visibility is the social angle. The meaning of resilience is different for multiple stakeholders. Even more, it is embedded into context-related characteristics: what does it mean to be resilient for different societies? Can we actually set a standard across Europe? This should be some of the guiding questions for further thinking on the resilient Europe (and worldwide society) we are building today.