Urban Resilience Strategic Exchange: Climate Week NYC 2025
The inaugural meeting of the Urban Resilience Strategic Exchange, a platform of global funders and research organisations committed to advancing urban resilience, focused on scaling up impact through collaboration.
A presentation on the work of Tomorrow's Cities is among the discussion points in the inaugural Urban Resilience Strategic Exchange (Photo: Tomorrow's Cities)
To coincide with Climate Week NYC 2025, members of the Urban Resilience Strategic Exchange (URSE) gathered for the first time on Wednesday 24 September.
URSE is a member-led platform to strengthen collaboration between global funders and leading research institutions committed to advancing urban resilience. It responds to a shared understanding that strategic alignment and partnership are essential to tackle the complexity of urban resilience, bridging thematic and geographic silos, and ultimately delivering impact at scale.
Through focused exchanges, URSE will surface emerging priorities, map funding gaps, identify opportunities for collaboration and risk-sharing, and ground investment pathways in robust, context-specific research.
This inaugural meeting was convened by IIED and SouthSouthNorth, and was chaired by the CLimate Adaptation and REsilience (CLARE) programme of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) alongside the Adaptation Research Alliance.
The invite-only session focused on scaling impact through collaboration across research disciplines, investment risk appetites, and partnerships with governments and the private sector. Members presented case studies from funder and research perspectives.
Urban living labs for resilience
The exchange was part of an initiative designed to scale the impact of locally led adaptation by addressing governance and financial barriers that prevent community-driven resilience solutions from being implemented at scale.
Through a network of urban living labs – embedded in diverse city contexts across Africa and Asia – IIED and partners are supporting interventions that are informed by governance analysis, enabled by artificial intelligence-assisted planning tools, and strategically aligned with national and municipal agendas.
Agenda
Welcome remarks (CLARE/FCDO, Adaptation Research Alliance, IIED)
Presentation: Scaling the impact of the Tomorrow’s Cities project through city and international partnerships (Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London)
Presentation: Building climate resilience needs scale; and scaling needs collaboration (Z Zurich Foundation)
Discussion: Brokering collaborations as an integral part of shaping investments and action-research interventions
Presentation: Understanding what shapes public investments in cities and vulnerable neighbourhoods (IIED)
Presentation: Understanding what shapes private investment in cities and vulnerable neighbourhoods (ARUP)
Discussion: Pathways to scaling impact – determinants enabling collaboration and the flow of resources from national levels to city and neighbourhood scales
Presentation: Housing injustice and its impact on resilience: how forced evictions deepen vulnerability and risk (IIED)
Discussion and closing remarks
