City governments worldwide are becoming increasingly aware of the
importance of making their cities able to withstand or recover quickly
from a range of predictable and unpredictable disasters and
catastrophes, driving global public spending on urban resilience
projects from US$97 billion in 2019 to US$335 billion in 2024, according
to a new report from ABI Research, a market-foresight advisory firm
providing strategic guidance on the most compelling transformative
technologies.
“Due to their very high population concentrations, cities are much more
vulnerable to the catastrophic potential of earthquakes, tsunamis,
volcano eruptions, sea level rise and flooding, food shortages,
wildfires, extreme heat, hurricanes, tropical storms and typhoons,
terrorist attacks, civil unrest, cyberattacks, war, diseases and
epidemics, nuclear or chemical contamination, extreme air pollution, and
many other emergency situations. So much so that many cities have
already appointed a Chief Resilience Officer,” explained Dominique
Bonte, Vice President, End Markets at ABI Research.
While the smart cities concept is very much geared toward ensuring
livability of citizens in the present, resilient cities guarantee future
livability in the face of a changing urban environment not only in terms
of acute shocks but also of chronic stresses related to economic,
financial, environmental, social, and institutional crises.
“The significant growth of global public spending on urban resilience
projects includes spending on both physical infrastructure and ICT
infrastructure and services. Resilience spending is currently dominated
by cities in developed regions. The cities of New York and Miami Beach
have announced budgets of respectively US$500 million and US$400 million
for flood prevention, sea-level-rise mitigation, and coastal areas
reinforcement. By 2024, cities in developing regions will account for
40% of all resilience spending,” Bonte said.
Resilience strategies and solutions include many components ranging from
detection and prediction via advanced sensors and AI-based
analytics to alert systems, evacuation procedures, rescue missions,
relief response modes in the immediate aftermath and recovery for
survivors and the city as a whole in the longer term.
Critical resilience technologies and paradigms include predictive
modeling and digital twins (already explored by cities like Cambridge,
England and Rotterdam, Netherlands), cybersecurity, redundant
infrastructure and system designs, decentralized service provisioning,
demand-response optimization, sharing economy and cross-vertical
integration, physical robustness, and robotics.
Key suppliers of resilience technologies covered in the report include
NEC, Bosch, and ZTE. Organizations like 100 Resilient Cities (100RC),
the United Nations (Making My City Resilient campaign), and the U.S.
National League of Cities (NLC) (Leadership in Community Resilience
program) are promoting best practices for designing resilient cities.
“Resilience programs for dense urban areas are closely linked to
sustainability efforts aimed at preventing pollution and mitigating the
impact of climate change on flooding and other severe weather
conditions. According to Lloyd’s City Risk Index, climate-related risks
alone account for US$122.98 billion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
under threat for a sample of 279 cities. With cities being centers of
economic activity, minimizing loss of GDP is the most important
incentive and justification for resilience spending in terms of Return
on Investment (ROI),” Bonte concluded.
These findings are from ABI Research’s Resilience
Technologies and Approaches for Smart Cities application analysis
report. This report is part of the company’s Smart
Cities and Smart Spaces research service, which includes research,
data, and Executive Foresights. Based on extensive primary
interviews, Application
Analysis reports present in-depth analysis on key market trends and
factors for a specific application, which could focus on an individual
market or geography.
About ABI Research
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foresight on the most compelling transformative technologies, which
reshape workforces, identify holes in a market, create new business
models and drive new revenue streams. ABI’s own research visionaries
take stances early on those technologies, publishing groundbreaking
studies often years ahead of other technology advisory firms. ABI
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