Realizing Resilience: Toward a Fairer, Greener Future — REPORT
How can we make our communities more resilient in the era of climate change and other large-scale disruptions?
Ten years ago, Island Press set out to answer that question. With support from The Kresge Foundation, we did a deep dive on urban climate resilience to help inform the emerging field. We began with a review of the existing literature in various disciplines, then convened an advisory committee and interviewed 40 activists, academics, and others at the vanguard of climate resilience.
The result of that work, Bounce Forward: Urban Resilience in the Era of Climate Change, was published in 2015. The report defined resilience as “the capacity to anticipate, plan for, and mitigate the dangers — and seize the opportunities — associated with environmental and social change.” It emphasized the need to think critically about resilience, to ask what is being made resilient, to what changes or threats, and for whose benefit.
Much has happened in the decade since Bounce Forward was published. So, in 2024, The Kresge Foundation commissioned Island Press to produce an updated report. Our goal was to revisit the framework we developed in 2015, assess progress toward making that vision a reality, and — especially after the 2024 presidential election — consider prospects for advancing resilience in the current political climate. To that end, we interviewed 30 individuals working on diverse aspects of resilience, including several who were consulted for the original report.
We found that the framework presented in Bounce Forward remains an aspirational guide to community resilience. We documented progress, setbacks, and opportunities in several key areas — climate resilience, equity and climate, energy, climate and health, and cities and the built environment. We found that the current moment poses unprecedented challenges as well as promising pathways to resilience. And finally, we uncovered welcome glimmers of hope, even in these dark and uncertain times.
