One critical step cities can take to facilitate their resilience building is to hire a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO).
The CRO is an innovative position in city government that ideally reports directly to the city’s chief executive, and acts as the city’s point person for resilience building, helping to coordinate all of the city’s resilience efforts. But what exactly does that mean? With so many cities’ CROs getting to work, we want to go into a little more detail about what makes a CRO.
CROs are an important part of how we’re trying to solve two major problems cities face:
- First, cities are complex systems made of an array of smaller, distinct actors like government agencies, local businesses, and offices of international organizations; and they often don’t communicate or interact with one another as much as they should;
- Second, the solutions cities develop are often not treated as scalable knowledge. Cities regularly solve problems that already have been addressed by other cities, when instead they could be modifying solutions and lessons learned in other cities, tailoring them to be more cost-efficient and effective.
The Chief Resilience Officer is the centerpiece of 100RC’s vision for helping cities deal with both of these challenges, while empowering them to develop improved urban resilience.
Source: 100 Resilient Cities
