The What it takes to build resilience in a City session strongly brought into focus the issue of community knowledge and the translation of resilience concepts so that communities can integrate and appropriate them. Purnomo Dwi Sasongko shared his experience as Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) of Semarang, suggesting that effective and engaging communications of city leaders will enable other stakeholders to understand problems and be able to work towards solving problems together.

Even for a mega city hard bit by floods and other forms of stresses and shocks like Bangkok, Dr. Supachai, the city’s CRO, said during his speech that it has become clear that resilience building is time consuming, but this time is unavoidable if effective outcomes are to be achieved. The CRO role, that formalizes resilience building as a permanent function of City Hall is also of prime importance.

Following interventions from these key personalities from the 100RC program, Steve Gawler from ICLEI Oceania shared his views of, echoing those of the previous two speakers. He argued that “80% of critical success factors in any city intervention depends on whether you have gotten the people involved or not”.