Helping to make New Orleans more resilient

More than ten years have passed since September 2005 when New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina and suffered massive damage through the ensuing storm surge and flooding. Culminating its fight back from disaster, the city’s leadership launched Resilient New Orleans (“Resilient Nola”, www.resilientnola.org) in 2015, the world’s first comprehensive urban resilience strategy.

We have played a prominent part in this initiative, joining up with utility company Veolia to help make the city’s vital systems more resilient to disasters, on the one hand, and to facilitate speedy relief and recovery on the other. At a ceremony celebrating Resilient Nola’s first anniversary in September 2016, the project’s key measures were presented to the public. Since then, the baseline exposure and existing resilience of all the city’s water, sanitation and related energy assets has been assessed to today’s risk as well as the expected risk in 30 years’ time, based on Swiss Re’s proprietary catastrophe modelling and climate risk analysis.

With this analysis in hand, New Orleans is exploring ways to utilise the capacity of the private sector to ensure the city can respond faster after a disaster and safeguard its economic future.