The City Resilience Program (CRP) helps cities become more resilient to the adverse impacts of disasters and climate change. The Program supports risk-informed urban planning, identifies investments that enhance city resilience, and facilitates access to financing to ensure that those investments materialize. This integrated approach helps create the conditions for equitable and sustainable economic growth in a context of rapid urbanization and increasing urban climate and disaster risk.
Established in 2017, CRP is hosted by the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and is supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF).
CRP works with World Bank Group operational teams and in collaboration with other development partners. The Program has a global scope with particular focus on Africa and Europe and Central Asia. CRP supports efforts to mobilize capital from the public and private sectors, including the use of innovative financing and funding mechanisms.
The program achieves its goals through three pillars: Planning for Resilience, Finance for Resilience and Partnerships for Resilience. See further information about the pillars below.
Throughout its work, CRP is aligned with the World Bank’s gender strategy and GFDRR’s 2020-2025 strategy, which includes Inclusive Disaster Risk Management and Gender Equality as a cross-cutting thematic area.
As of 2024, the program has worked in over 93 countries, informing $5bn of investments in urban resilience.
Highlights
Watch the City Resilience Program videos playlist on YouTube
CRP’s Three Pillars
Increasing urban resilience against growing climate and disaster risks requires an integrated and spatially informed approach that captures the interplay between the natural and built environments. The Planning pillar’s operational and technical support helps cities understand and plan for the increasing risks they face and prioritize policy and infrastructure interventions.
CRP has developed a suite of standardized, rapid analytical tools, such as the City Scan and the country-level Urban Climate Risk Analysis. CRP Planning also offers bespoke analysis of a city’s resilience challenges and provides World Bank teams and municipal clients with tailored urban resilience advisory to inform investment decisions in light of those challenges. This support can involve identifying zones and sectors for priority resilience interventions, estimating infrastructure costs and benefits, or help with the technical aspects of an investment project. Further, CRP provides cities with the means to quickly access best-in-class, highly specialized technical services in key topics, such as flood risk and extreme urban heat.
In Focus: Urban Heat
Extreme urban heat is rapidly becoming a significant cause of harm to health, education outcomes, labor productivity, and physical infrastructure. It also increases energy demands in cities, leading to higher emissions. Since 2022, CRP has significantly enhanced its support to cities for understanding and addressing the challenges of urban heat stress and heat waves.
The Program has been especially active in South Africa, where, in partnership with South Africa's National Treasury, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO, and the Digital Earth Partnership, CRP has been helping cities harness the power of community in tackling this challenge. In 2024 Local community members from the cities of Buffalo City, Cape Town, and Tshwane, working with advanced sensor equipment, measured temperatures and other climate conditions across their cities through dedicated heat mapping and awareness campaigns. These efforts raised the profile and understanding of extreme heat phenomena in these cities, increasing consensus for action and building on prior similar campaigns in the cities of Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg. The Program also held two urban heat-focused workshops to help government and city officials make informed decisions on mitigating this risk.
And because extreme urban heat is a global problem, CRP has also been supporting cities around the world to protect themselves from heat stress in Albania, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Ghana, Guinea, India, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Romania, Rwanda, Serbia, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, and West Bank & Gaza.
In the context of constrained government funding and capacity, private sector partners can help design, finance, deliver, operate, and maintain urban resilience infrastructure. CRP’s Finance pillar provides upstream operational and technical support to mobilize both public and private financing of urban resilience investments.
It provides early-stage advice on how urban resilience investments can benefit from private sector participation. This includes concept-testing of investments and consultation with potential private sector investors in order to leverage private capital for urban resilience investments, through PPPs or capturing increased land values. CRP analyzes the financial and regulatory contexts of specific project concepts by identifying and testing out business models. This work includes comparing scope options and contracting modalities, costing, analyzing risk, and assessing the affordability of infrastructure. And it supports the preparation of transaction documents: technical support related to government contracting and oversight of specialist transaction advisory services, ensuring procurements are completed successfully with contracts that will deliver urban resilience over the investment period.
In Focus: Flood Mitigation in Dar es Salaam
The Msimbazi river in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania is prone to frequent floods, with catastrophic effects for those living, working, and traveing on its banks. Since 2018, CRP has been working with the city to support the World Bank’s Msimbazi Basin Development Project, which seeks to protect lives and livelihoods by reducing flood risk. CRP analytics revealed a wide set of climate risks and highlighted the urgency for mitigation measures. The program next advised on the area’s redevelopment, including possible roles for the private sector. This included analyzing the potential for funding flood resilience investments through land value capture, along with guidance as to how a designed park on the site, central to the urban design of the project, could be operated sustainably over the long term.
In late 2022, $260 million in concessional lending from the World Bank was approved, including an expected $60m from co-financiers, a significant step towards unlocking up to four times that amount in private sector development. This multiplier effect will enable the implementation of further transformative projects, bolster economic growth, and create jobs while ensuring the long-term sustainability of these resilience investments.
Watch a video featuring CRP’s work in Dar es Salaam here.
CRP alone cannot meet the strong demand from cities for support with designing attractive resilience investments and prioritizing resilience in their long-term planning. The Partnerships pillar connects cities with partners who have interests and expertise in urban development and disaster risk management and can provide support with identifying solutions, designing investments, and funding them with public or private capital. These include international financial institutions, development partners, private sector investors, academic experts, and technology firms.
CRP also fosters city-focused collaboration and knowledge development within the World Bank Group and beyond: building capacity of city officials through workshops and technical sessions and contributing to cutting edge knowledge development and sharing.
In Focus: Cities and Climate Change Workshop in Mombasa
In May 2023, CRP, in partnership with the World Bank, the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and the City Climate Finance Gap Fund, brought together officials from 14 African cities in Mombasa, Kenya to address the critical issue of climate change in cities and its integration into long-term urban infrastructure planning and implementation. The four-day “Cities and Climate Change Technical Workshop” provided a unique platform government officials to explore, identify, and prioritize climate change mitigation and adaptation actions for their cities.
Through training sessions, panel discussions, interactive mapping, and case studies, the workshop equipped city representatives with the knowledge and strategies to tackle challenges relating to flood risk management, solid waste management, renewable energy, sustainable mobility, and more.
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