Cities Know How to Climate-Proof Themselves. They Just Can't Pay For It

The Chief Resilience Officers are not alright.

A cohort of these still relatively novel public officials descended on Miami this week for the Resilience 365 conference, bringing with them tales of woe about the financing gap standing between them and effective climate-proofing of their jurisdictions.

Jennifer Jurado, Chief Resilience Officer for Broward County in Florida — an oceanside region with over two million residents — offered a particularly grim horror story. Her team had spent months modeling a US$28bn flood resilience plan for the county, to be paid for via state and local financing, that would produce an estimated US$40bn in economic outputs, reduce annual average damage losses by up to US$4bn, and preserve some US$30bn in property values.

The local business community had said publicly they’d stand behind the plan. Jurado’s team were confident in the modeling. But it wasn’t enough to move from concept to implementation. “We could not get, at that time, past the sticker shock of what these numbers meant,” she told the conference. “There is an absolute lack of appetite for anything that would raise property taxes … it’s just absolutely off the table,” she explained. 

Boxed in by tax politics, Jurado had to put the plan on ice. Instead of billions, all she could extract from the county budget last year was U$1.5mn for culvert improvements.