New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu & City
Officials Join 100 Resilient Cities In Celebrating First Anniversary Of
Resilient New Orleans, World's First Comprehensive Resilience Strategy
Local
Leaders Celebrate the First Year Accomplishments of Resilient
New Orleans and Share Preliminary Results
of Swiss Re/Veolia Partnership
NEW ORLEANS –
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Deputy Mayor, CAO, and Chief Resilience
Officer (CRO)
Jeff Hebert were joined by 100 Resilient
Cities – Pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation (100RC) to celebrate the
first anniversary of Resilient New Orleans, the world’s
first-ever comprehensive resilience strategy, which has guided the city beyond
recovery from Hurricane Katrina and onto resilience building for the years to
come. In the past year, more than seventy-five percent of the actions that were
outlined in the Resilient New Orleans strategy are either complete or under
way.
“Last year, we marked the ten year anniversary of Hurricane
Katrina and pivoted toward our goal
of building a stronger, more resilient city,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
“Together with our partners at The Rockefeller Foundation and 100 Resilient
Cities, we launched Resilient New Orleans, the world’s first comprehensive city
resilience strategy. Because being resilient means more than having levees and
wetlands to hold back water, we also focused on combating the longstanding, generational challenges around crime,
education, income inequality and striking a balance between human needs and the
environment that surrounds us. In the last year, we’ve made tremendous
progress, completing or executing on more than seventy-five percent of actions
outlined in the Resilient New Orleans strategy. We’re on our way towards
becoming one of the most resilient cities in the world by 2018, our City’s
300th anniversary.”
A
hallmark initiative of Resilient New
Orleans is the first public-private partnership on resilience, through
which the city is collaborating with leading global (re)insurance provider,
Swiss Re, and Veolia, a long-standing corporate partner of New Orleans with
cross-functional expertise in water, waste and energy management. Together, the
two companies provide New Orleans with access to a unique combination of
skills, perspectives and capabilities around modeling, risk management, and
operations planning. Swiss Re/Veolia developed a detailed and structured
Technical and Risk Assessment that identified resilience improvements for
various systems with a focus on reinforcing facilities, and improving response
and recovery time. This is important for building infrastructure solutions that
can withstand critical stresses and shocks, both today and in the future.
Nikhil
da Victoria Lobo, Senior Vice President for Public Sector Business at Swiss Re;
Mark Sanderson, Vice President for Business Development at Veolia; and Cedric
Grant, Sewerage & Water Board Executive Director for New Orleans were some
of the prominent stakeholders that joined 100RC President Michael Berkowitz to
celebrate New Orleans and discuss how the city’s resilience strategy has
changed the way it prepares for, and responds to, its 21st-century
challenges.
New
Orleans launched Resilient New Orleans
on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in 2015. The holistic,
action-oriented strategy focuses on three visions to shape the future of the
city: ‘Adapt to Thrive,’ ‘Connect
to Opportunity,’ and ‘Transform
City Systems.’
In the past year, New Orleans has secured more than $200 million in funding for
resilience-building projects, combining water management, storm protection, workforce
development, recreation, and neighborhood revitalization.
Speakers
at Monday’s event updated attendees on several strategy initiatives and major
accomplishments led by collaborations between the newly established Mayor’s
Office of Resilience + Sustainability, as well as partners across public,
private, non-profit and philanthropic sectors.
“In
a 21st-century world that poses challenges like globalization,
urbanization and climate change, a city’s ability to build resilience is
critical to its future,” said Jeff Herbert, Deputy Mayor and CAO, CRO, City of
New Orleans. “By taking aim at the actionable initiatives outlined in Resilient New Orleans, our city has
become a resilience pioneer. In its first year of implementation, the strategy
has leveraged cross-sector collaboration, innovation and key partnerships to
make exciting progress toward our resilience goals.”
“One
year after unveiling Resilient New
Orleans, and 11 years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, New
Orleans continues to forge an exciting path from recovery to resilience,” said
100RC President Michael Berkowitz. “A major goal of 100 Resilient Cities was to
incentivize the private sector to begin to create new products that would help
cities build resilience, and today we’re seeing the first fruits of that labor.”
“This
is a unique partnership, bringing two private sector companies from very
different backgrounds together, in a greater endeavor to make a major cities
like New Orleans more flexible and more responsive to evolving risk,” said
Nikhil da Victoria Lobo, Head Global Partnerships Americas, Swiss Re. “It's not
just about having a strategy in place: it's the actual implementation that will
determine the success of New Orleans' pioneering resiliency work. We're excited
to be playing a part in this very important journey, which is a first step to
helping other cities achieve the same thing.”
"Veolia and Swiss Re have the opportunity to play a crucial role in helping cities become more resilient to such event as Hurricane
Katrina", said Laurent Auguste, Senior Executive Vice President of
Innovation & Markets at Veolia. "We are strongly convinced that
resilience reinforces cities attractiveness and competitiveness. That’s why we
increase awareness around the vulnerability of cities' critical infrastructures,
including water systems, and accelerate activities to improve essential
services continuity".
Other
partnership projects include:
- The Small Business
Resilience project led by the United Nations office for Disaster Risk Reduction
and AECOM. The initiative has assisted 250 New Orleans small businesses and is
now evolving from the initial assessment phase to its second chapter, which
will include discussions and workshops about disaster preparedness. The project
has also leveraged support from the Walmart Foundation.
-
‘Living with
Water,’ a series of initiatives that highlights New Orleans’ quick work to
combat its most serious threats. The initiative leverages community-based
organizations like Ripple Effect, a program for elementary school students, to
ensure each New Orleans student has basic water literacy.
To
learn more about shaping the future of a resilient New Orleans visit: resilientnola.org.
###
|
