Resilient Communities
Objective: ISEN will discover, test, and scale infrastructure solutions that strengthen community resilience to climate change stressors.
As we enter an era defined by climate and ecosystem disruptions, global communities must adapt to new levels of acute and chronic stressors. More intense and frequent storm and flooding events, longer droughts, and higher global average temperatures, combined with outdated or insufficient water and energy infrastructure, are creating conditions in which communities are challenged to adequately respond to, and recover from, these shocks.
Programs like the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Communities Initiative have made tremendous early progress in bringing attention to the need for robust and flexible urban resilience solutions.
Learning from their example, ISEN can scale existing and emerging technological innovations for energy, water, and ecosystem management to develop region-specific solutions that build community capacity for recovering from or preventing future stressors. Effective solutions will also deliver economic and social value to their host communities – a “resilience dividend” - in the form of economic productivity and improved public health.
ISEN WILL:
DEVELOP new grid control mechanisms that enable greater penetration of distributed and renewable resources, including microgrids.
APPLY our understanding of complex ecosystem dynamics to implement natural, green infrastructure for urban and rural flood management.
PARTNER with the City of Chicago, a member of the 100 Resilient Cities Initiative, to iteratively test on-site solutions.
WHY IT MATTERS:
- Cities currently cover 2% of the world but consume 66% of the world’s energy and contribute to 70% of greenhouse gas emissions.
- According to the United Nations, nearly all global population growth between 2016 and 2030 will be absorbed by cities, stressing aged energy and water infrastructure.