The climate is changing. This is putting immense pressure on cities and their critical role in providing homes and jobs for their citizens. Cities need to be able to fulfill their sustainability goals within the context of a changing climate. Scientific evidence demonstrates that there is now only a small window of opportunity in which to adapt. Climate science provides a range of possible scenarios and impacts resulting from climate change, but it is not able to offer certainty on specific impacts in specific places. Decision makers thus face a dilemma – science cannot yet provide them with definite impacts for which they should prepare, but if they wait for scientific certainty then it will be too late to adapt.

Rapid resilience is a methodology and decision making framework for developing pathways to enable government and its partners to prepare for climate change impacts at the city scale - despite uncertainty. It does this by: targeting responses at the root causes of vulnerability to climate change impacts and designing adaptation pathways that respond to different climate change scenarios and enable a city to flexibly move between pathways over time to achieve desired levels of resilience. This paper will illustrate Arup’s work globally in this area, with particular emphasis on Urban Infrastructure Adaptation.