'Chief Resilience Officer' was a novel title a decade ago but is now a fixture across many major city and county governments seeking to address the impacts of climate change and related adaptation challenges. With costly extreme weather events, fires and sea level rise screaming for attention, localities and states continue to hire for or support such positions.

Today, talking about resilience is “definitely more mainstream,” said Stefan Schaffer, who previously served nearly five years as chief resilience officer for the city of Chicago.

The vision for the chief resilience officer position is to work across departments to help cities communicate, prepare and adapt in the face of disasters or extreme weather caused by climate change that can shock its infrastructure and systems. The position at first was predominantly a grant-funded role but more cities over time have started to build full offices of resiliency, said Schaffer, now a city strategist with the Natural Resources Defense Council's American Cities Climate Challenge.

But this type of resilience work is expensive and cities are seeking billions in federal funding to support these efforts in an equitable way. Budgeting more for those offices allows local leaders to "not only plan and design policies or programs that actually address these longer-term, [almost] existential threats, but actually drive implementation on them in a coordinated manner," Schaffer said.

Many cities had their initial foray with formal resilience positions through the 100 Resilience Cities (100RC) initiative launched in 2013 under The Rockefeller Foundation. The initiative in part helped seed chief resilience officer positions and covered their salaries for two years to take the startup risk off local governments. Although the foundation shuttered that initiative in 2019, it set aside $8 million to continue supporting those officer positions and their work. Some of the key individuals involved in 100RC also went on to establish the nonprofit Resilient Cities Catalyst (RCC).

Read the full article about climate resilience offices by Maria Rachal at Smart Cities Dive.