From Recovery to Resilience: How to Protect Cities from Climate Impacts

Extreme heat and natural disasters are getting more severe and their damage, more destructive.

The Rockefeller Foundation is helping cities and communities build resilient infrastructure to withstand extreme climate risks.

This approach can be traced back to 2012, when Hurricane Sandy caused massive damage to coastal areas of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey when it struck with wind gusts between 60-85 miles per hour and storm surges ranging from 7-14 feet. One hundred and forty-seven lives were lost, and thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed — with estimates of $50 billion in reported damages across the East Coast.

When the U.S. government’s rebuilding task force proposed a regional design competition to help with the recovery process, The Rockefeller Foundation made a $1 million grant to help administer the “Rebuild by Design” program, in which design teams of architects, landscape artists, engineers, and others worked with local communities to develop recovery plans for the areas most impacted by the storm.

The Foundation’s initial grant — combined with a matching donation from the JPB Foundation — gave $200,000 to each of the ten design teams tasked with developing plans to rebuild impacted areas to make them more resilient, sustainable, and livable.

map of the New York and New Jersey region highlighting resilience projects from the Rebuild by Design competition after Hurricane Sandy, including the Big U in Lower Manhattan, Living Breakwaters in Staten Island, Hunts Point Lifelines in the South Bronx, Living with the Bay in Long Island, Resist-Delay-Store-Discharge in Hoboken, and New Meadowlands in New Jersey. Text reads “Rebuilding with Resilience: Lessons from the Rebuild by Design Competition After Hurricane Sandy.” Logos of The Rockefeller Foundation, Rebuild by Design, and Georgetown Climate Center appear at the bottom.

Courtesy of Georgetown Climate Center

The result: Six greenlit proposals to rebuild infrastructure across New York and New Jersey. These projects were designed to not only help the area recover but ensure that it was more resilient against future threats. In addition to structural work, the projects created new jobs, tighter social cohesion, better air and water quality, and nature-based flooding barriers.

Over the following years, HUD and local governments allocated roughly $1.6 billion to the projects championed by the Rebuild by Design program.

Rebuild by Design became a model for how to use innovative approaches to rebuild communities affected by hurricanes, natural disasters, and climate-related impacts in ways that enhance physical, social, economic, and environmental resilience.

In the years since Hurricane Sandy, The Rockefeller Foundation has continued efforts to help cities and communities build resilience.

Today, that looks like supporting a new Adaptation and Resilience Fund (A&R Fund) — a $50 million commitment to locally led adaptation projects that support communities facing extreme climate risks such as heat, floods, and droughts.

It’s also the focus of our support for Blue Forest, a nonprofit conservation finance organization that funds ecological forest restoration.

Since its founding, $20 million has been deployed by Blue Forest to fund landscape restoration projects across California, Oregon, and Washington. The organization works closely with Indigenous partners to bridge Western science with Indigenous knowledge and practices, vital for creating a more resilient landscape. It has protected over 28,000 acres of forest as a result of this work.

Our changing climate continues to wreak havoc on our infrastructure, our health, and our food systems — especially for our most vulnerable communities.

What we have learned over the years is that by centering our work around innovative, resilient, long-term solutions, we can create a stronger world for generations to come.