10 - Financing City Resilience

Summary

Cities face formidable, if not existential, challenges as they manage hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, earthquakes, severe weather, and other kinds of disasters. Between 1980 and 2020, nearly 300 major events caused almost $2 trillion in damages in the United States. And it is getting worse. The average annual number of events costing more than $1 billion in damages rose from 2.9 during the 1980s to 13.5 during the 2010s, with increases occurring between every decade. Costs are rising as well, increasing by roughly one-half to nearly double between each successive decade. Humans play a key role in triggering disasters or making them worse, especially through climate change and altering landscapes. They can also act to lessen the effects of natural disasters on cities, though not eliminate them. This requires planning and financing. This chapter begins in Part I with an overview of the two generic kinds of disasters and why I focus on just one of them – the localized form. This will lead into Part II, which primarily addresses the role of local and regional governments to plan for disasters and their mitigation. It also outlines an economic and financial strategy to implement those plans. Existing tools to finance resilience investments are summarized in Part III. They include key federal tools and what I call “conventional” tools. Innovative and emerging tools focusing on capitalizing resilience savings and value-added are the focus of Part IV. I conclude with observations about the brave new world of financing city resilience.