The scope and scale of Hurricane Sandy and her impact on cities like New York has helped bring five critical realities into much clearer focus:
- Extreme weather events are happening more frequently than ever before. Whether it is heat in Chicago, earthquakes in Haiti, or hurricanes in the Northeast, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said as he toured the flooded Ground Zero site, we are living in a time when "100 year storms are happening every two years and we need to plan accordingly".
- "Coastal city" has a new definition. Everyone has always acknowledged that Atlantic City is on the coast and subject to storms that batter the coastline ? not everyone thought about New York City that way. Today, because of volatile and unpredictable extreme weather, all cities with dense populations and proximity to large bodies of water need to act like coastal cities and prepare for what used to be unthinkable.
- Sandbags and finger-crossing don't work. Acting like a coastal city ?planning for extreme weather when you have a dense population to protect ? requires more than temporary prophylactic measures initiated right before the event happens. Serious, thoughtful, and science-based planning for extreme weather scenarios has to happen in cities, taking their unique geography, demography and topography into account. Then, the right, long-term investments that are likely to help mitigate damages must be made.
- Less government doesn't apply to disasters. The pictures of Governor Chris Christie and President Obama touring storm ravaged New Jersey together reinforced the fact that even in the politically polarized United States, citizens want their government to be there to help in times of emergency. That help includes public sector expenditures, whether for clean-up or compensation for losses.
- Big problems require big new approaches. If you pay close attention to what is happening in Washington, DC or other capitals around the world, you might think that we've lost our capacity and willingness to come together and solve big, complex problems. And to some extent that is true, especially when we expect legacy institutions, public and private, simply to change. But increasingly, at the local level, innovative approaches involving unlikely partners playing unlikely roles are disrupting the status quo and addressing seemingly unsolvable challenges like those posed by Sandy.
While these examples don't specifically address extreme weather change, they do provide a three-part framework that cities wanting to address the new reality could follow. As you can see, this framework relies heavily on changing the traditional roles of and relationships between business, government, and philanthropy.
A new civic infrastructure or group of senior leadership from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors must be built and dedicated to the problem. In Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, and the Twin Cities, Living Cities' Integration Initiative is supporting the building of resilient multi-sector taskforces that are tackling complex systems-level problems. For example, in the Twin Cities, a diverse group of policymakers, corporations, foundations, and community organizations have come together to link and integrate previously disconnected efforts around transit planning and engineering, land use planning, affordable housing, workforce development, and economic development. Using the region's growing transit system as a development focus, the effort aims at accomplishing together what none of the groups could accomplish on their own ? expanding access to jobs and service for the region as a whole, while also unlocking opportunities for low-income people. The keys to success: sustained executive leadership, including from the mayors themselves; specific, audacious goals; and data-informed decision making.
This new civic infrastructure requires for-profit companies to embrace a broad definition of shared value and bring all their assets to the table as Procter & Gamble did in Cincinnati. Knowing the challenges they had in hiring a qualified workforce locally, P&G helped launch a broad effort to fix education, from cradle to career. P&G committed corporate leadership, foundation grants and a modification of Six Sigma so nonprofits could more effectively manage to agreed-upon results. These new types of partnerships, with significant corporate leadership from companies as diverse as P&G, GE, and Altria have now formed in more than two dozen cities around the country.
Government must adopt innovation practices that mirror those used by leading entrepreneurial companies around the world. Bloomberg Philanthropies' Innovation Delivery Teams Initiative is a $24 million investment in Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis and New Orleans to do just that. In each city, a group of people reporting directly to the mayor is charged with generating and implementing bold solutions to thorny, high-priority problems, ranging from small-business development to homicide reduction. Similarly, over the past five years, chiefs of staff to mayors from the nation's 35 largest cities have come together at the Ash Institute for Municipal Innovation at Harvard's Kennedy School as a peer-to-peer innovation network to share ideas and reduce the time it takes for the best ideas to spread nationwide.
Old assumptions about how to pay for what we need must be discarded. Lines drawn between investments historically viewed as "private" and those viewed as "public", which have been blurred in the past decade, need to be blurred further. Chicago, led by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former President Bill Clinton, is doing just that with the Chicago Infrastructure Trust. Private investment firms have made an initial pledge of $1 billion for public infrastructure projects, which could serve as a break-the-mold model for funding the types of investments needed to address extreme weather. Similarly, the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) recently announced it planned to invest $4 billion in domestic infrastructure projects.
Surprisingly, similar innovation can be seen with taxes. Many cities, including unlikely places like Oklahoma City, OK and Lafayette, LA, have approved ? with strong business community support ? dedicated, limited term, tax increases for critical public purpose infrastructure such as inner city schools and even broadband deployment. These post-Sandy times will require local government and business leaders to have frank discussions about the investments that will be needed to secure continuous business operations, how they will be financed and how the cost of those improvements will be fairly shared.
We can't continue to ignore harsh truths about extreme weather. The vulnerability of our cities is not only a serious threat to our nation's well-being, but to the business of business. Together, we must think beyond disaster response to smart investments in infrastructure and other preventative measures. Luckily, a framework for planning, governing and funding these types of challenges has already been built by some of the nation's leading cities, elected leaders and businesses. It just needs to be adopted broadly. The cost of failing to do so ? in terms of lost lives, revenues, and property ? is far too high.
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/how_cities_can_prepare_for_an.html
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