Financing Urban Resilience: Shifting Paradigms from Protecting Assets-to Safeguarding Systems

The successful implementation of the New Urban Agenda will require innovative ways of networking and partnerships amongst urban stakeholders and this side event will highlight the necessity of inter-governmental and inter-agency coordination on urban resilience, across various scales of interventions and levels of governance. 
The ability of a city to bounce back after environmental shocks and cope with routine stresses is determined by the resilience of its urban systems and not just the robustness of its infrastructure. This is particularly true for critical services such as transport, communications, water supply, power and waste management. The conventional approach that various actors took to supporting cities was to work on the scales at which they had a comparative advantage. However resilience thinking requires integrated action across sectors and scales and requires a convergence of actions that are not just coordinated but synergic. Furthermore, access to planning and financing resilient infrastructure investments remains a challenge for local governments. 
This side event will look at how the Urban Climate Change Resilience Trust Fund (UCCRTF) is working on shifting the paradigm from asset-based thinking to system based thinking, to ensure that infrastructure and services can respond adequately to shocks and stresses. UCCRTF with its Financing Partners (DFID, USAID, Rockefeller Foundation and SECO), collaborators (Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) and ARUP) and implementation partners will share emerging lessons on how to better plan for systemic resilience that delivers projects which reach across sectors and scale. 
 The expected outputs of the side event are: 
- Build evidence and tools on system based urban resilience approach and support that cities require in planning, financing, implementing and maintaining infrastructure. 
- Foster new forms of cooperation and networking amongst urban stakeholders to identify knowledge gaps on financing urban resilient infrastructure.