Melbourne is participating in the 100 Resilient Cities challenge. The initiative, fully funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges of the 21st century.

Resilient Melbourne

Melbourne’s first resilience strategy was endorsed by the City of Melbourne’s Future Melbourne Committee on 17 May 2016.

The Resilient Melbourne Strategy is the culmination of work by people from across sectors, council boundaries and community groups, coming together to consider a shared challenge: what can we do to protect and improve the lives of Melburnians, now and in the future?

Developed with the support of 100 Resilient Cities– Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation (100RC) – the strategy sets out a series of distinct, yet connected, actions that will help make Melbourne a viable, sustainable, liveable and prosperous city, today and long into the future.

The strategy’s four action areas are:

Adapt – reduce our exposure to future shocks and stresses
Survive – withstand disruptions and bounce back better than before
Thrive – significantly improve people’s quality of life
Embed – build resilience thinking into our institutions and ways of working

Resilient Melbourne is auspiced by the City of Melbourne in collaboration with the 32 metropolitan Melbourne councils, and associated partners. The project is led by the Chief Resilience Officer who is funded by the 100 Resilient Cities initiative. The City of Melbourne has provided the project team and additional investment.

What is resilience?

Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, businesses and systems within a city to survive, adapt and grow not just as a response to shocks (such as heat, fires and floods) – but also to the stresses that weaken the fabric of a city on a day-to-day or cyclical basis.

Examples of these stresses include:

rapid population growth
increasing social inequality
increasing pressures on our natural assets
unemployment, particularly among young people
climate change
increasing rates of alcoholism and family violence.

To find out more, we asked leaders from across Melbourne involved in the project, `What does resilience mean to you?`.

Building Melbourne’s first Resilience Strategy

In early 2015 leaders from government, academic, infrastructure, emergency management, environment, community and health sectors worked together to identify issues that impact Melbourne’s resilience, both now and in the future.

Resulting from four months of forums, roundtables, interviews and research, five clear themes or focus areas emerged. These were analysed further to inform the development of Melbourne’s first Resilience Strategy.

The preliminary resilient assessment was endorsed by Future Melbourne Committee on 9 June 2015.

In August 2015, five forums were held where participants have been asked to help conceptualise and scope projects, new ways of working, and other innovations to significantly improve Melbourne’s resilience.

Project teams reviewed existing initiatives across metropolitan Melbourne that contributed to building resilience, with a view to understand what projects have the potential to be scaled up in scope or geography.

Between December 2015 and March 2016 a two staged consultation period was completed. Over 1,200 individual pieces of feedback were received, reviewed and incorporated into the final strategy. In February and March 2016 the Chief Resilience Officer met with Metropolitan Melbourne CEOs and elected officials, to provide an opportunity for individual feedback. In April 2016 the Mayors and CEOs came together to discuss the incorporated changes and to discuss implementation of projects identified in the strategy, which you can read here:

Melbourne Magazine