Capital Mobilization for City Resilience

The World Bank Group’s (WBG) City Resilience Program (CRP) is an effort to assist city governments to build greater resilience to climate and disaster risks. For many major cities in the world, strengthening urban resilience is a multibillion dollar agenda that requires strong partnerships and new sources of capital. Cities are sometimes held back from pursuing the necessary investments because they lack the technical expertise and/or the access to capital to finance them. CRP tries to fill that gap by i. leveraging the WBG’s broad set of sectoral expertise in designing urban resilience projects, and ii. better connecting cities to the necessary financing. The aim of CRP is to catalyze a transparent pipeline of well-prepared and bankable investment opportunities and to improve access for private and institutional investors to crowd into new markets. It is in this sense that CRP seeks to act as the bankers of the city, and to facilitate strategic investments that address the vulnerabilities and risks that cities face in a holistic way.