The world is urbanizing. The climate is changing, and many cities are on the front lines of managing this new reality. Whether cyclone or fire, flood, flu, or influx of refugees, crisis is the new normal.

Against this backdrop, we need a new paradigm for how we plan for our urban future: We need to build resilience.

Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, and systems to adapt, survive, and grow in the face of stress and shocks, and even transform when conditions require it.

Developed as a partnership between The Rockefeller Foundation and Arup, and based on three years of research, the City Resilience Index is a powerful, tested tool that helps policy-makers and stakeholders understand and tackle these challenges in a systematic way. It incorporates a framework that many cities have already used to create resilience strategies.

Whatever the specific threats a city faces, the City Resilience Index motivates cities to be future-focused and inclusive. Designed as a self-assessment, the tool generates a resilience profile that reveals a city’s specific strengths and weaknesses, creating a baseline to plan from and measure future progress against.