Australia’s recent experience of intense bushfires, storms, flooding and heat is driving increasingly urgent city action to address the climate emergency. The Resilient Sydney Platform has enabled city-wide transparency of risks and opportunities, and growing accountability for tangible action on the ground.
Launched in 2019, the Platform hosts data, visualizations and tools to enable city governments to understand the key environmental impacts in their communities. During the 11th session of Cities on the Frontline, we learned more about what Sydney is doing to create a new generation of environmental and social accountants to evidence and report on investments for resilience and climate action.
Some insights shared during this session offered by Resilient Cities Network:
“In order to work across Metropolitan Sydney with so many players, we need to be incredibly collaborative, we need to have all sorts of processes that takes an enormous amount of effort. But one thing we knew would really assist us is, was if we could all be sharing the same data, and all be interpreting that data to guide decision making, that was one of the things that was going to really unify us.”
“For me this is what resilience is all about, there’s the definition that we use but we are trying to live and breather it with this platform and really drive data into it. But we need the capacity of everyone in our city to try and understand this information, act on it to really make the changes we need.”
“A lesson that follows from understanding cities as a mosaic is that you need a different solution and different emphasis for different parts of the city.”
“The data didn’t come to us in this perfect format, it came in different geographies, different sectors, different subsectors, but our software and methodology enables it to be transformed in a consistent framework so cities can use it to do work.”
