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Resilience Maturity Model for Urban Climate Adaptation Assessment

Solution Overview

The Resilience Maturity Model is a methodological approach to define the degree of resilience attained by cities, based on objective, measurable and comparable parameters.[4] This strategic tool was designed to provide cities with a roadmap towards enhanced resilience, offering a holistic overview of the resilience building process and helping end users to understand resilience as a multidimensional objective.[1] The model enables cities to assess their current maturity stage and to identify the policies to implement in order for the city to evolve and move to the next maturity stage.[1]

Technical Components

The Resilience Maturity Model is structured in five stages of maturity: (1) starting, (2) moderate, (3) advanced, (4) robust and (5) vertebrate.[5] These five incremental stages guide local governments through the ideal path for building-resilience: Starting, Moderate, Advanced, Robust, and Vertebrate.[3] The model includes 38 policies that cities should implement to build resilience, grouped into six dimensions: (1) leadership and strategy, (2) stakeholder engagement, (3) awareness, (4) risk management, (5) resource management and (6) emergency management.[5] Each maturity stage includes a description of the objectives of each stage, the stakeholders actively involved in each maturity stage, and a list of policies that should be followed.[3] The revised version was implemented in a software tool, the Resilience Maturity Model Assessment Tool, and it was tested by the cities of the project.[5]

Implementation Details

This approach is one of five resilience-building tools that comprise the European Resilience Management Guideline, which were co-created as part of the Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project.[7] The SMR project worked closely with the cities of Glasgow, Donostia, Kristiansand, Riga, Rome, Vejle and Bristol to develop, test and finally use the project tools.[6] The European Resilience Management Guideline comprising a toolbox of five well-integrated tools was developed iteratively and validated through a co-creation process with the project end users.[7] The final version of the Resilience Maturity Model (Version 3.0) was completed on 29 June 2017.[5] The model underwent significant revisions following advice from project-external participants of the standardization process.[3] Through involvement of German standardization institute DIN, the project developed three CEN Workshop Agreements based on the project outputs.[3] The Resilience Maturity Model was documented as CWA 17301 City Resilience Development – Maturity Model, a CEN Workshop Agreement developed through the SMR project.[3] The SMR project went through a whole process of standardizing the results so that they could be replicated and implemented by the cities more easily, according to Marta Iturriza, a doctoral student at Tecnun.[9] The standardization process brought external participants into the process of documenting their tools and benefits.[3]

Benefits and Impacts

Rome used the Resilience Maturity Model to assess its current resilience level and to identify areas for improvement.[2] The city has used the SMR tools to enhance its resilience to these challenges.[2] The paper defines five steps for integrating standardization in research projects with a focus on (city) resilience and shows the benefits of the standardization process for fostering the engagement of relevant stakeholders.[8] The SMR project integrated several European cities in its co-creative approach for developing city resilience tools and the related standards series CWA 17300 on 'City Resilience Development'.[8]

Climate Adaptation Relevance

Rome is one of the few cities that benefits from several resources at the same time to support urban resilience, including the 100RC initiative and the European project SMR - Smart Mature Resilience, under the Horizon 2020 Program.[4] The Resilience Maturity Model provides cities with a structured framework to systematically build resilience capacity across multiple dimensions including risk management and emergency management.[5]

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