Ready-to-Fund Resilience Toolkit and Guide
Ready-to-Fund Resilience is a package of resources describing how local governments and partners can design more fundable resilience projects by pulling specific policy levers, seeking key partnerships, using innovative accounting practices, inverting power structures, and rethinking processes.
Description
Ready-to-Fund Resilience is a package of resources developed by an expert advisory group including city officials, finance experts, and resilience organizations across national adaptation networks convened by Climate Resilience Consulting (CRC) and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP).
Ready-to-Fund Resilience is developed for small- and-mid-sized local government practitioners working on resilience; small- and-mid-sized local government department leads with power over, and a stake in, climate resilience funding and finance; and organizations and government bodies with the capacity and jurisdiction to support local government climate resilience funding and finance through policy, resources, technical assistance, partnerships, or process change.
Centered around 10 key characteristics of successful climate resilience projects, from grey infrastructure to green infrastructure and social infrastructure, Ready-to-Fund supports local government practitioners to:
- More effectively operate within the resilience funding and finance system.
- Better prepare governments to receive funding and finance for climate resilience-building.
- Create social equity through resilience funding and finance.
The insights from Ready-to-Fund Resilience support the creation of vibrant, equitable, and disaster-resilient local governments rather than temporary ‘fixes’ that perpetuate the status quo and lead to further disaster risks. To fully act on these insights, a stronger enabling environment for both public and private funding and finance via updated policy, regulation, changed collaboration processes, and new approaches to financial analysis are needed.
Ready-to-Fund is supported by the Climate Resilience Fund’s Coordination and Collaboration in the Resilience Ecosystem Program. It is one of four projects providing input into a practitioner guide for the US Climate Resilience Toolkit’s Steps to Resilience Process managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Did the Sendai Framework change or contribute to changes in your activities/organization? If so, how?
The work of Climate Resilience Consulting and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals is focused on climate change and climate-related hazards. Thus, activities being conducted both contribute to and are guided by several global agendas including the the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework, and the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Ready-to-Fund Resilience is particularly part of the good practices of ARISE, the Private Sector Alliance for Disaster the Private Sector Alliance for Disaster Resilient Societies. The project addresses all five commitments for ARISE, namely to raise awareness, influence, share knowledge, catalyze and implement activities to contribute to the Sendai Framework.
What led you to make this commitment/initiative?
What was your position before making this Voluntary Commitment / prior to the Sendai Framework?
In 2020, the US incurred 22 billion-dollar disasters and reports from UNEP and World Bank forecast continually rising disaster costs, regardless of the scale of mitigation that occurs. In tandem, deep social inequities and racial injustices inhibit otherwise capable communities from thriving. The obligation to mitigate disaster risk and damage has triggered a movement to build more green and equitable local governments. While unavoidable costs may drive action, the multiplicative opportunities and community co-benefits that can be created provide motivation to plan for and build climate resilience. Still, plans for change often fall short of mobilizing finance. Making the business case and securing resilience financing are the most common inhibiting factors. Furthermore, growing understanding of inequitable conditions creates an imperative to transform our socio-economic systems. What we do with resilience-building funds and financing will prove highly influential in determining what kind of communities we live in decades from now.
Deliverables and Progress report
Deliverables
Deliverables are the end-products of the initiative/commitment, which can include issuance of publications or knowledge products, outcomes of workshops, training programs, videos, links, photographs, etc.
This technical guide provides the foundation for the Ready-to-Fund Resilience Toolkit. This guide is written for and by local government resilience practitioners and applies to a variety of types of resilience projects, from “traditional” grey infrastructure to green infrastructure and social infrastructure.
Ready-to-Fund Resilience authors expect that widespread and consistent use of its resources may generate transformational opportunities and community benefits for disaster risk reduction and resilience. These include a stronger business case for resilience projects and secure climate resilience funding and financial support through such methods as the addition of social and environmental considerations to the economic considerations of a “traditional” cost-benefit analysis, as well as the use of mechanisms such as social discount rates that attach more weight to the long-term project benefits.
This toolkit describes “how” local government leads and partners can design more fundable projects by pulling specific policy levers, seeking key partnerships, using innovative accounting practices, inverting power structures, and rethinking and redesigning internal processes. The toolkit is a self-guided resource that helps local government leaders and partners operate within current finance and policy systems to better prepare themselves and their communities for climate resilience funding and finance.
The characteristics discussed in Ready-to-Fund Resilience offer insight into what a positive enabling environment looks like as well as action opportunities to bring disaster risk reduction and climate resilience funding and finance strategies to the next level by changing the policy environment.
The training will provide an opportunity to share the toolkit and guide to local government officials and other partners involved.
In the longer term, the project envisions that stronger local resilience initiatives may shape the structure of communities decades into the future, both physically and socially, as social equity may be better addressed throughout all components of climate resilience funding and finance.
Porgress report
Training US government and community leaders in the most vulnerable locations, including Louisiana. Collaborating with federal government (Housing and Urban Development) to consider how to grow pipeline of investible projects. Working with investors to fill the gap: Now we have money and policy that suggest there should be more resilience projects. What is missing is the project pipeline.
Finalized federal government Steps to Resilience Training "Prioritize and Plan and Funding and Finance"
Training "Successfully Competing for Public Funding and Private Financing"
Planning for Harvard executive education three part sessions: Real Estate Climate Action, Risk Assessment, Resilience, and Net Zero Success
Organizations and focal points
Implementing Organization(s)
Focal points
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