On March 23 and 24, Penn IUR, Perry World House (PWH), and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy (KCEP) jointly convened three dozen urban policy and finance leaders to find ways to spur investment in urban adaptation to climate change. Financing Urban Adaptation to Address Climate Change included eight expert panels highlighting the implementation and financing of subnational programs and projects designed to adapt to global warming-induced hazards that threaten urban lives and livelihoods.
“Urban climate adaptation will be central to human well-being in a world where 70 or more percent of the world’s population by mid-century is living in cities—and no doubt suffering from what will most likely be well above 1.5 degrees Celsius warming,” said Jeffrey Sachs, University Professor and Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, in his keynote address. “It’s so important that you are getting together this group of experts to think about this issue.”
Over the course of two days, participants shaped a five-point roadmap to stimulate funding in support of urban adaptation to climate change, from (1) mapping needs, (2) coordinating adaptation and mitigation, (3) determining appropriate policy instruments, (4) supporting governmental subsidiarity, to (5) designing new financing approaches. Penn IUR Co-Director Eugénie Birch and KCEP, PWH, and Penn IUR Fellow Mauricio Rodas fleshed out the roadmap more fully in their article for Penn IUR’s Urban Link.
The two-day workshop was part of the City Climate-Resilient Infrastructure Financing Initiative (C2IFI), a joint initiative of PWH, Penn IUR, and KCEP and led by Rodas. C2IFI is building knowledge and facilitating knowledge-sharing to enable mayors, city officials, and municipal stakeholders to find partners, data, financing instruments, best practices, funding models, and experts to assist them with project preparation and advance climate-resilient infrastructure.
Day2: Tools for Urban Adaptation Finance
8:35-9:00 Keynote Address: The Challenge of Effectively Communicating the Urban Adaptation Urgency
Simon Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor of German, Department Chair, Germanic Languages and Literatures, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
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