Maritime Resilience Breakthrough Labs: Resilience4Ports

Maritime shipping, responsible for transporting 90 percent of global trade, provides a crucial link between communities and the global supply networks needed to support health, well-being and livelihoods. Yet maritime infrastructure is increasingly exposed to shocks and stresses.

Ports face cumulative pressure from climate change, geopolitical uncertainty, net-zero commitments, technological disruption, and the urgent need for social and environmental equity. These pressures, alongside the essential role of ports in global maritime systems, elevate ports as a focal point in advancing a resilience-based approach to the transformation of maritime infrastructure.

At COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the Sharm El Sheikh Adaptation Agenda was adopted and the UN High Level Climate Champions announced a comprehensive set of 2030 Breakthroughs for the Maritime sector maritime-specific resilience breakthroughs. Through its Maritime Resilience Breakthroughs Lab: Resilience4Ports, Resilience Rising and its partners support unlocking these breakthroughs by 2030.

The Maritime Resilience Breakthroughs Lab: Resilience4Ports is the first Innovation Lab launched by Resilience Rising, tapping into its global, multi-sector consortium of policy makers, engineers, businesses, financiers, and infrastructure owners and operators.

Through this program, we aim to mobilize a critical mass to create the scale and momentum necessary to break through the industry’s barriers to resilience. The program will improve the resilience practice across the ports value chain by bringing together stakeholders and a community of practitioners around a common framework to raise awareness and strengthen relationships, create a shared understanding of the needs and challenges, and clarify and connect decision-making and investment that can be taken to scale.

The Resilience4Ports Lab will reinforce ports as a leading global example of a just and equitable, net-zero transition that prioritizes and effectively implements resilience.

Resilience Rising Innovation Labs foster globally recognized, high-impact, and integrated solutions that can be taken to scale. An Innovation Lab is a convening platform hosted by Resilience Rising that draws from across its established Communities of Practice with the aim of co-creating solutions and pathways that are fundable with clearly articulated roles and collectively agreed plans of action.

Program Details

The Maritime Resilience Breakthroughs Lab: Resilience4Ports builds on the prior work of The Resilience Shift on ports and the movement it created to mobilize infrastructure owners to bridge infrastructure resilience gaps.

The Lab engages key members of the Resilience Rising consortium, including the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure (ICSI) and Resilience First, as well as the perspectives of policymakers and the finance community. As the secretariat to NavClimate, a multi-stakeholder coalition committed to supporting the inland and maritime navigation sector as they respond to climate change, Resilience Rising will also engage these stakeholders in program activities.

Resilience4Ports taps into the global technical expertise of Arup, Resilience Rising’s strategic partner. Lloyd’s Register Foundation and Lloyd’s Register Group are also key partners in this effort.

Working together with a core set of organizations, including a globally-representative cohort of port authorities, owners, and operators, as well as diverse port community stakeholders, the Resilience4Ports Lab efforts will focus on:

Identifying critical research and findings that serve as the basis for collaborative study, design and implementation of priority solutions.
Defining priority solutions and metrics that benefit the ports system as well as the in-land and maritime systems and broader communities that rely upon them.
Piloting priority solutions with partners through concrete action plans and monitoring and evaluation of defined impact metrics.
Sharing of findings from pilot activities and scaling of successful approaches and activities by partners with clear ownership and lines of responsibility.
Establishing a longer-term ports and cities network that can implement, iterate upon, and take the program’s solutions to scale.

If you are interested in participating in the Resilience4Ports program, please email info@resiliencerisingglobal.org or register below.

red and blue crane under blue sky during daytime

Partnerships

Communities globally depend on resilient, low carbon ports to prosper. With our partners, we are exploring opportunities for resilient, system-wide, transformation through the lenses of decarbonisation, technology and port cities.

Arup

Lloyd’s Register Foundation

Lloyd’s Register Group

Race to Resilience

ICSI

Resilience First

Resilience Rising is seeking interested individuals and organizations to join the Resilience4Ports Lab to participate in activities in 2023 and beyond:

Subject-matter experts on the topics of port and maritime infrastructure, port and shipping operations, coastal marine ecology, coastal risk and resilience, coastal community resilience planning, sustainable building materials, digital technologies, human capital development related to ports.
Port owners, authorities and operators representing all types and sizes of ports across the global that are interested in learning about, sharing and piloting climate adaptation and resilience solutions.
Port cities and community organizations, in all global regions, interested in working collaboratively to co-create more resilient coastal communities with public and private port actors.
Global and local businesses and industries who recognize the critical value of resilient ports and port communities in supporting their business.

Please register your interest in joining the program below.