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A view of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, one of the hardest hit by Katrina.
A view of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, one of the hardest hit by Katrina. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters
A view of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, one of the hardest hit by Katrina. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

New Orleans launches resilience roadmap to tackle climate and social challenges

This article is more than 8 years old

As well as focusing on climate-related catastrophes, the 41-step resilience strategy addresses social issues such as poverty, racial inequality and crime

In the week that marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans officials have launched a comprehensive “resilience strategy” aiming to secure the city’s future.

As well as seeking ways for the city to both prevent and survive more climate-related catastrophes, it treats social challenges such as poverty, racial inequality and crime as disasters that must be addressed if New Orleans is to become truly “resilient”. In the strategy’s parlance, it tackles both “shocks” and “stresses”.

Resilient New Orleans is a joint effort between the city and the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, which provides money and technical support for urban areas facing threats to their long-term prosperity.

Conceived as a roadmap that highlights priority areas and seeks to close gaps in existing plans, the strategy proposes 41 actions designed to make the city more equitable, adaptable and prosperous, from promoting energy efficiency to enlarging the public transportation network to establishing personal emergency savings accounts to boosting resources to combat the erosion of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, which are a vital line of defence against severe weather.

While numerous plans and ideas to improve conditions have been proposed in the wake of Katrina, which killed some 1,000 people in Louisiana and displaced hundreds of thousands when levees failed and flooded 80% of New Orleans, officials insisted that the wide-ranging blueprint has the means to succeed.

A short film created to mark the launch of the New Orleans resilience strategy

“People in New Orleans are tired of planning and this strategy is a means to take action,” said Jeff Hebert, the city’s chief resilience officer, at the launch on Tuesday. A statement said that “partners in the private and philanthropic sector will provide greater than $1m in immediate tools and services” to begin implementing the strategy, and more funds will be sought from a variety of sources.

“All of the actions have pretty clear ownership and there’s been a lot of work already to identify who the partners are who will support the actions,” said Michael Berkowitz, the 100 Resilient Cities president. “Cities that have that catalyst for change, the ones that have suffered through severe events or have really clear risk profiles, those cities sometimes do the most innovative work because the mayor doesn’t have to convince anyone that business as usual’s not going to work. Everybody in the city describes time as ‘before Katrina’ and ‘after Katrina’.”

The mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, said the city is in negotiations with FEMA, the federal emergency management agency, about how to proceed with the reconstruction of its water and drainage system. In an example of how the project seeks to foster interconnectedness, Landrieu said he hoped the overhaul would provide employment and training opportunities for many of the city’s jobless. “Everything we do now has a resilience lens on it,” he said.

The 90-page strategy (PDF) was developed over nine months and sought input from members of the local community. One, Jeffrey Schwartz, is the executive director of Broad Community Connections, an organisation aiming to revitalise one of the city’s most historic and busy thoroughfares.

“New Orleans has horrible rates of obesity and diabetes; that is in part because we suffer from not having enough fresh food access and access to healthcare,” Schwartz said. He said that one of the group’s aims is to “overlay real-estate development with programming” - not installing business tenants who are able to pay the highest rents, but ones who best meet local needs.

The strategy calls for leveraging resources for coastal projects – for example, by using money from the BP oil spill settlement – as well as an outreach campaign to improve public awareness of environmental issues. It also stresses the importance of implementing projects that will help urban areas live with stormwater, not simply keep it out.

A microgrid project is planned that will enhance the city’s backup electricity generation and mitigate the effects of outages, which could be vital in keeping essential services running in the event of another hurricane. Another suggestion is to put solar panels on New Orleans’ city hall.

“If you’re going to live in a coastal city, you have to speed up your ability to respond. It’s not just about building to prevent a disaster, it’s got to be about the response and the comeback after a disaster,” said David Muth, director of the Gulf Restoration Programme at the National Wildlife Federation.

Muth said the rebuilt levees ($14.5bn has been spent on upgrades to the flood defence system since Katrina) plus a recent influx of new residents who were not in the city during the 2005 storm risked breeding a sense of complacency that is dangerous given the worsening effects of climate change on the region.

On average, the Louisiana coast is losing wetlands at the rate of a football field every hour: “Deltas are not static … the sea has been winning for 300 years and that victory has accelerated over the past 100 years,” Muth said. “The cost of prevention is tiny compared to the cost of rebuilding and eventually having to move much of the city’s infrastructure because we can’t hang on to it where it is … We’ve had a series of storms that really bring home the message: ‘Guys, we’re way more vulnerable than we thought.’”

As part of the strategy, a “resilience center” will open in New Orleans to serve as a resource and training facility for cities around the world, encouraging the sharing of ideas and best practices.

“What makes [the strategy] so impressive is that it’s so fully integrated,” said Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. “It really is looking at the physical infrastructure, both natural and built, and linking it to economic and social resilience. For New Orleans to really recover and for most cities around the world to become truly resilient, the three domains – physical, economic and social – need to be tightly interwoven, and this really does do that.”

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