Rockefeller Foundation & Arup Debut a Pioneering Tool that Allows Cities to Better Understand Their Capacity to Address Social, Physical, or Economic Challenges

LONDON, May 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, The Rockefeller Foundation and Arup introduced the City Resilience Index (CRI), the first-ever comprehensive tool to help cities assess their resilience, identify their vulnerabilities, and better prepare themselves for the future.

The CRI is a powerful, tested tool created to help policy-makers, urban planners and stakeholders understand and tackle the systemic challenges that increasingly threaten cities. Comprising 52 resilience indicators, the CRI assesses key resilience qualities ­such as diversity, awareness, and self-regulation, that are critically important to building resilience within a city.  The CRI gives cities the ability to assess their preparedness and ability to accommodate current and emerging challenges, through a secure online interface through which cities can enter their data.  Each city's findings can guide urban policymaking, planning, and investment.

"Cities increasingly understand that building resilience is a 21^st century imperative, and now for the first time they have a way to comprehensively assess where they are strong, and where they need to improve to be ready for whatever may come their way," said Judith Rodin, President of The Rockefeller Foundation, which supported Arup to develop the CRI. "The CRI was created over three years and in consultation with a range of cities globally. It is designed with rigor, and in a way that cities everywhere will benefit from using it as a planning and decision-making tool, that can help them realize a resilience dividend from investments in their growth and the well-being of their citizens," added Rodin.

Designed primarily as a self-assessment, this tool will generate a resilience profile that will reveal a city's specific strengths and weaknesses, creating a baseline to plan from and measure future progress against.

"Every city is unique, and each faces specific challenges. But, the factors that enable cities to deal with disruption are universal," said Jo da Silva, Director, Arup. "The CRI captures the breadth of issues that contribute to a city's resilience. It provides a practical means to measure resilience, and a common language that will enable cities to learn from each other."

"The City Resilience Index represents an important advancement in assessing resilience, providing a new opportunity for cities, through an analysis of real data, to better assess what their resilience capabilities are," said Michael Berkowitz, President of 100 Resilient Cities, Pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation.

For more information on the City Resilience Index, please visit: www.cityresilienceindex.org.

About The Rockefeller Foundation
For more than 100 years, The Rockefeller Foundation's mission has been to promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world. Today, The Rockefeller Foundation pursues this mission through dual goals: advancing inclusive economies that expand opportunities for more broadly shared prosperity, and building resilience by helping people, communities and institutions prepare for, withstand, and emerge stronger from acute shocks and chronic stresses. To achieve these goals, The Rockefeller Foundation works at the intersection of four focus areas—advance health, revalue ecosystems, secure livelihoods, and transform cities—to address the root causes of emerging challenges and create systemic change. Together with partners and grantees, The Rockefeller Foundation strives to catalyze and scale transformative innovations, create unlikely partnerships that span sectors, and take risks others cannot—or will not. To learn more, please visit www.rockefellerfoundation.org.

About Arup
Arup is the creative force at the heart of many of the most prominent projects in cities across the world. It is investing time, knowledge and research resources into the study of cities as the front line of global challenges to be faced this century. Made up of 12,000 designers, planners, engineers and consultants working from 92 offices and 40 countries, Arup's global reach and unique partnerships are helping cities to understand resilience more meaningfully. Being a wholly independent, employee-owned organization, Arup is able to invest in pioneering new thinking and approaches to urban development that focus on creating resilient communities and a sustainable future, as part of its overall mission 'to shape a better world'.

To find out more, please visit www.arup.com 

SOURCE The Rockefeller Foundation

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http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org