With an expected growth of 2 billion residents by 2050 and under a changing climate, cities around the world are aware that they need to increase their resilience against water related shocks and stresses to protect their physical, economic, natural, and human capital that define a city's key strengths. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how complex and interconnected the world is and how much uncertainty will impact planning in the future, whether it’s climate change or a global economic downturn. Cities and planners need to move away from treating infrastructure projects as individual investments and view them as part of a system that comprises a portfolio of interlinked assets that provide essential services for society.

This session will expose participants to tools that enable cities to introduce resilience into their decision making, to diagnose and design for resilience to enhance outcomes including the safety of urban inhabitants, livability, livelihoods, equity, and economic development. It will present how the impact of and possible solutions to flood events in urban areas can be assessed with a risk-based approach and how the effects of measures can be quantified by determining the cascading impacts on its underlying systems and calculating those through a systems network analysis.