Cities Frontline Speaker Series - Digital Public Goods for Resilience
When
Mar 27, 2025
Time
10:00 AM
Where
Online
About the series
The Cities on the Frontline Speaker Series began in 2020 as a rapid response to the pandemic and its devastating effects on cities worldwide. Since then, it has grown into a leading platform for urban resilience, convening more than 13,000 participants across 90+ sessions.
In 2025, as climate change, rapid urbanization, and growing cascading risks increase pressure on cities, the series will take a deeper dive into critical challenges, including extreme heat, water resilience, energy resilience, and biodiversity loss.
Discussions will also explore the role of nature-based solutions, participatory design, and digital tools in building resilience, alongside the urgent need for sustainable funding models to scale these efforts. By bringing together experts, city representatives, and practitioners, the series will spotlight thought leaders shaping the most urgent urban resilience debates today.
About this session
Global digital public goods (DPGs)—including open-source methodologies, standardized resilience assessments and user-friendly platforms—offer scalable and efficient tools to help cities address challenges like flooding, extreme heat, biodiversity loss and rapid urbanization. While these resources may be freely available and designed for widespread use, many cities, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, face barriers to adoption due to limited funding, technical capacity, and localized expertise.
Additionally, fragmented approaches to resilience-building and the difficulty of scaling tools across different urban contexts create a gap between what exists and what cities can effectively use. To bridge this gap, digital public goods must be more accessible, adaptable, and practical for cities of all sizes.
The second Cities on the Frontline session of 2025, will highlight how global digital public goods are transforming urban resilience. Through the presentation of tools and case studies by World Bank Disaster Risk Management Specialists, Ross Eisenberg, Marie-Flore Michel, and Pierre Chrzanowski, we will uncover how open-source tools, nature-based solutions, and data-driven strategies can help cities scale their resilience impact.