This page is approximately a 4 minute read
This page was published on
Fitsum Gelaye, Head of Engagement, Africa, Resilient Cities Network
Nicole Ponce, Associate, Climate Resilience, Europe
José Ahumada, Senior Consultant, Cities and International Development, Arup
City governments make decisions with long-term implications for people, places and economies, planning across systems and over decades. Communities experience risk in daily life, through rising living costs, pressure on health services, extreme weather, housing challenges and economic uncertainty. Too often these perspectives operate in parallel, yet resilience takes root when city decisions are informed by community experience.
The need to connect these perspectives has never been more urgent.
Cities are facing an increasingly complex and uncertain risk landscape. Climate, social, economic and political shocks are becoming more frequent and intense, while their timing, scale and impacts are often difficult to predict. These risks rarely occur in isolation. Instead, they interact with existing stresses such as poverty, inequality and constrained public services, often placing the greatest burden on communities with the least capacity to absorb another shock.
A city is only as resilient as its most vulnerable communities.
Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s 2026 World Risk Poll report “A resilient life: How wellbeing shapes the capacity to cope” exposes an important fault line. Among people at the bottom of the wellbeing scale, resilience differs little between high-income and middle-income countries. Put simply, national wealth does not automatically translate into resilience for those who are struggling most: vulnerability remains local, even in some of the world’s wealthiest places.
The Poll also points towards where action can have the greatest effect. The steepest resilience gains come from improving conditions for people at the bottom of the wellbeing distribution. This highlights the importance of ensuring that local services, infrastructure and resilience planning are informed by the needs and experiences of vulnerable communities, where resilience gaps are often most pronounced.
City governments: the crucial link between communities and resilience.
All over the world, we are seeing city governments stand up to the challenge and adapt their approach to put community resilience at the forefront.
In Cape Town, quantifying flood risk in newly formed informal settlements is revealing what flooding costs both residents and the city, bringing these communities more directly into risk planning. Mexico City is exploring parametric insurance to give low-income households and small businesses rapid support after an earthquake. In Rotterdam, the city is working in coordination with local partners and communities on housing, social services, safety, public space and economic opportunity to strengthen wellbeing at the neighbourhood level.
These examples signal an important shift towards addressing the needs of those on the ground.
Yet such efforts are often developed as individual projects, and not as institutionalized systems for addressing risk.
The Poll found that “fewer than one in four adults believe their government or neighbours care about them a lot”. This does not mean action is absent. It shows that plans are insufficient when support remains scattered or invisible. Cities need approaches that connect community experience and existing assets to budgets, planning and accountability, turning listening from an episodic exercise into an ongoing way of working that shares agency with communities. Learnings can be taken from programmes such as Quiero Mi Barrio ("I Love My Neighbourhood") in Chile, which continuously supports local communities over two to three years in identifying, planning, designing and delivering projects that improve public spaces and neighbourhood infrastructure.
From Risk Data to Resilient Action – promoting localization as a key system for risk planning.
From Risk Data to Resilient Action, an initiative led by Resilient Cities Network and Arup with support from Lloyd’s Register Foundation, is testing how cities can build scalable systems that connect community experiences of risk with planning and decision-making. Tested in Lagos and Salvador, it brings together insights from the World Risk Poll, city strategies, local data and community knowledge.
The methodology focuses on communities experiencing the greatest vulnerability. Community engagement grounds the analysis in how risk is experienced today, while foresight explores how risks may evolve and interact. Sustained collaboration between city officials and communities helps identify gaps in existing plans and translate broad ambitions into locally relevant priorities.
Many cities already have resilience strategies and action plans. The next step is to root implementation in local priorities through mechanisms that align city and community goals, responsibilities and resources. Ultimately, when the most vulnerable communities become more resilient, the whole city does. When communities are genuine partners in shaping, delivering and evaluating solutions, cities can move more effectively from understanding risk to acting on it.
The Resilient Cities Network are partnering with Arup to use World Risk Poll data to enhance how cities assess environmental, social and economic risks, improve decision making and target investments.
Using blended data from the 2023 Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll we, along with our partners at Gallup, have developed the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Resilience Index.
Professor Milena Nikolova from the University of Groningen is using World Risk Poll data to analyse how changing technologies affect safety in the workplace across different industries and countries, informing more targeted safety interventions.
