City Resilience Plans

City Resilience Plans can be a helpful resource for colleges and universities undertaking resilience planning. The following city plans were chosen as examples because they each offer an idea, concept, or approach that can help schools with their resilience planning and implementation.

City	City Type	Highlight
New York City, NY	Coastal	This plan is helpful for ideas on detailed metrics and goals that make resilience achievable; this can help schools get ideas for the kinds of metrics and action steps to include in their own plans.
Boston, MA	Coastal, 100 Resilient Cities	This plan frames all metrics and goals around social and racial equity, as opposed to environmental sustainability or climate change. The plan still addresses these issues, but it treats the inequitable impacts of climate change as the impetus for doing so.
Cleveland, OH	Inland	This plan comes up with unique action steps that many other plans did not think of; many are about community engagement and easily implementable in schools. Examples include climate fairs, Green Party Crasher Program, and climate ambassadors.
Madison, WI	Inland	This plan integrates federal and state policies into the resilience action steps. While campuses will plan on a smaller level, this macro-level analysis is still important to consider–especially if schools receive federal funds.
Los Angeles, CA	Coastal, 100 Resilient Cities	This plan is designed for its residents to read; it uses accessible language, has a “how to read an action” guide, and is framed in such a way as to convince its’ audience of the importance of resilience. This language and approach could be helpful on college campuses as well.
Philadelphia, PA	Inland, ICF International	This plan offers ideas of how to combat vulnerabilities to resilience. It offers ‘Existing Resilience Efforts’ for each major metric (flooding, extreme heat, etc..). Schools can use these ideas to help brainstorm their own solutions.

Thank you to Climate Programs Intern Valerie Weiner for compiling this list