In “Sustainability and Resilience in Cities: What Cities are Doing,” Kent Portney, ISTPP Director in memoriam, and Bryce Hannibal, ISTPP Research Fellow, examine how cities are becoming more sustainable and building resilience through city policies and programs. Previous versions of this work focused solely on efforts cities are undertaking to become more sustainable. This study, however, augments the sustainability approach with evidence from a recent empirical study on how cities are building resilience in the face of increasing severity and costs of hazards and disasters. Portney and Hannibal highlight the efforts of eight major US cities and examine policies and programs in the sustainability and resilience areas. They also describe city sustainability and resilience scores from Portney’s previous work on sustainability in cities (2013) and a more recent study carried out by Texas A&M researchers and graduate students in 2019-2020. As building resilience through policies and programs is still an up-and-coming policy agenda, Portney and Hannibal provide evidence of some “best practice” models that other large cities may replicate in order to face increasing environmental challenges while maintaining sustainable practices to preserve natural resources and build local economies.
Portney, Kent E., and Bryce Hannibal. “Sustainability and Resilience in Cities: What Cities Are Doing.” In Environmental Policy. 11th ed., ed. N. J. Vig, M. E. Craft, and B. G. Rabe. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2021.
