What We Do

What We Do

Arm in arm with our member cities and chief resilience officers, we are building a safer, more equitable and sustainable future for all residents trough the three-tier approach.

Chief Resilience Officers bring together diverse stakeholders to address shared challenges, inform decision makers, outline future trends, design innovative resilience programs and leverage funding opportunities. R-Cities works towards further empowering them to address complex urban challenges through peer-to-peer learning, knowledge exchange and collaboration. Based on the Global Chief Resilience Officer Survey conducted in October 2021, knowledge exchanges have helped over 64 percent of member cities strategize holistically to address major urban challenges.

Local governments and communities are strengthening their resilience by advancing climate action and social equity and improving their response to risks. Our strategic tools, knowledge resources and multi-city, multi-partner programs deliver on the ground impact within and beyond our member city network.

Cities already challenged with known stressors are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic shocks while facing financial distress and major investment gaps. To address this, we support our member cities through dedicated investments that help them address vulnerabilities and build capacity.

Our Programs

R-Cities supports its network cities to develop resilience strategies. Our programs respond to and build on these resilience strategies, with action-oriented initiatives co-designed with our member cities and partners.

A core feature of our programs is our strong emphasis on peer-to-peer learning, which we foster through our network activities, city engagement, and Communities of Practice. These communities leverage the knowledge of member cities and partners, and introduce a wide range of specialized resilience tools to accelerate our global resilience practice in our city network and beyond.

R-Cities’ programs focus on three priority areas: Climate Resilient Cities, Circular Cities and Equitable Cities. In each of these priority areas, we ensure that programs are designed and executed with holistic urban resilience thinking at their core. Both the focus on holistic resilience and the three programmatic priorities reflect the needs and demands of our member cities.

Our Resilient Community Impact Funds (RCIFunds) then bridge an important gap between intention and action, providing cities with funds to initiate resilience innovation. To ignite opportunities for investors to engage with cities that have the political will and scale to deploy innovations immediately, R-Cities’ RCIFunds is grant-based funding that helps network cities to identify and develop projects, experiment and deploy pilots.