Four months after scuttling its short-lived but successful 100 Resilient Cities program, The Rockefeller Foundation announced this week that it will finance a new initiative that will help municipalities around the world develop market-based tools to address climate change-induced problems. The $8 million project, officially the Climate and Resilience initiative, will be lead by former 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) staffers and sustain the work completed with Rockefeller money in 100RC partner cities.
Elizabeth Yee, who served as 100RC’s Vice President of Resilience Finance for five years, will be joining the Climate and Resilience initiative as the managing director. Before landing at 100RC, she worked in public finance at Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Barclays.
“Rapid changes in climate are exposing global citizens to unpredictable risks, and there is an increasing need to leverage data and technology to ensure we make informed decisions, and design and deliver solutions that improve the resilience of communities,” said Yee in a prepared statement. “Continuing to support the 100RC Network is a core part of our ability to understand and tackle these immense challenges, which require creative, blended capital solutions to address at scale.”
The Climate and Resilience initiative will facilitate grants for disaster recovery, and will tie into the foundation’s long-term work in health, food, energy, and, per the press release, the “expansion of US economic opportunities.”
Last month CityLab reported that part of the reason for 100RC’s dissolution was that The Rockefeller Foundation wanted to drop around $5 or $6 million on the program annually, not the $30 to $40 million it was spending. Beyond money, the foundation didn’t quite know how to measure the results of its investments, particularly the Chief Resilience Officers (CROs). The CROs are a network of professionals who oversee resilience capacity-building in member cities’ governments whose salaries were paid by 100RC.
The Climate and Resilience initiative will continue to cut checks for CROs, but as of now, it is unclear how long the initiative will be funded.