Cities need to act now to protect residents and infrastructure from the impacts of extreme climate events, but they’re not all starting from equal footing — and the under-resourced localities that most need funding lack the capacity to obtain it, according to experts on a recent Clark University panel discussion about how cities can thrive in the era of extreme weather.
“The resilience gap that we have is as much a capacity gap as it is about knowledge or planning,” said Mark Davidson, a geography professor at Clark’s School of Climate, Environment, and Society. Municipalities understand what needs to be done, he said, but “the harder question for them is how do we act on what we know at this stage? How do we get the capacity?”
Cities lack the fiscal and administrative capacity to pursue and plan resilience projects, he said, citing a National League of Cities survey that found 84% of municipalities say they have insufficient capital budgets and 81% are rethinking infrastructure investments as Biden-era funding comes to an end. Cities can’t address climate risk — a permanent and growing problem — with temporary money, he said.
“In the past, we've often tried to fill capacity gaps through competitive grants, state and federal governments giving monies, but winning those competitive grants requires capacity,” Davidson said. “You need staff time, you need expertise. Sometimes you need matching funding, and that's a paradox. So cities often need to compete with one another to win the money to create capacity. So those with capacity already have an advantage.”
Cities can expand their fiscal and administrative capacity by sharing expertise with each other and with universities, community organizations, private firms, regional bodies and networks like ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, Davidson said.
The panelists offered three solutions to help cities finance resilience infrastructure.
1. Respond with layered programs.
In 2024, Riverside, California, experienced 79 days with a temperature above 95 degrees Fahrenheit — a 65% increase over 2003 — and had a peak temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit, Riverside Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson said.
In response, Riverside — a city of about 323,000 residents located about 55 miles east of downtown Los Angeles — created a stack of programs to address extreme heat as well as wildfire, which she said “is also a big one for us now.”
Riverside is working with Bloomberg Philanthropies to create a Youth Climate Action Fund and writing a climate action and adaptation plan, Dawson said. The Fire Department’s Office of Emergency Management launched Ready Riverside, a campaign that informs residents on how to stay safe during heat events and prepare for emergencies, and last year the city received a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant to conduct an extreme heat summit and tabletop exercise, a simulated emergency planning session involving public and nonprofit partners.
The city also offers a community engagement map for city officials and residents to assess the existing tree canopy and plan tree planting, which Dawson said helps the city apply for grants. The map helped Riverside get a California Transformative Communities grant to plant 1,000 trees and place solar panels on 100 houses in a neighborhood disproportionately impacted by heat. “It's helping us address heat islands in the city and provide shade, and then also it gives us a data set for planning documents, mitigation and working with our universities,” she said.
“Despite the federal government stepping back … the work continues,” Dawson said. “It has to.”
2. Build new financing infrastructure.
“These are difficult times,” said Melissa Hoffer, Massachusetts’ first chief climate officer. “And they are times that are really requiring us to think very differently about how we are going to address this problem.”
When Hoffer first took office in 2023, her priority was to understand how much the state would need to invest in decarbonization and resilience. Her office’s analysis found that $90 billion to $130 billion is required to address key resilience needs such as high-hazard dams, coastal investments and protecting trees and wetlands through 2050, she said. The Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience released that study, along with a financing playbook, last year, Hoffer said.
“We know that we will not have enough money to invest in these resilience investments if we just do it through subsidy,” Hoffer said. “We had to really start thinking about financing tools.”
Those tools include the Massachusetts Community Climate Bank, initially capitalized with $50 million in dedicated funds from the state, which provides low-interest financing to help preserve and retrofit affordable housing with improvements such as fortified roofs and heat pumps, Hoffer said.
After catastrophic flooding exposed gaps in federal disaster assistance in 2023, Massachusetts created a disaster response and resilience fund to address disasters that don’t qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency relief while requiring recipients to rebuild more resiliently, Hoffer said. That fund is included in the Mass Ready Act, a state environmental bond bill introduced by Gov. Maura Healey last year. If Mass Ready is approved, the fund would be one of the nation’s first revolving funds to finance low-interest loans for resilience projects, Hoffer said.
Local governments nationwide are also shifting toward recruiting private capital at resilience projects’ inception, structuring public-private partnerships as part of the projects’ design from the start, said Saharnaz Mirzazad, executive director of ICLEI USA.
ICLEI USA recently released a resilience finance guidebook to help local governments determine the real value of reducing risks “and translate that into a language that a lender, insurer or private investor will actually act on,” Mirzazad said. “And this has been, in my mind, a real game-changer at the local government level.”
3. Engage the community early — and structurally.
Mirzazad and Dawson stressed that community engagement should be built into funding requirements. “It shouldn't be an afterthought or just 'good to have' — it's important to think about it and value the opinion of the people on the receiving end of the infrastructure,” Mirzazad said.
For major infrastructure projects, Mirzazad recommends establishing a local governance body with a direct role in prioritizing spending, maintenance and other decisions to create greater accountability and transparency while giving communities a meaningful voice in how the projects evolve. “This has a lot of benefits — fiscally, in community satisfaction and in helping people feel empowered and see what really matters addressed,” she said.
In Riverside, Dawson said the city held 36 events and gathered over 4,000 comments in the process of creating its climate action and adaptation plan. “Public engagement is at the heart of it,” she said. “So, they are involved every step of the way.”
