What resilience measures do decision-makers need to make policy decisions?

The Greater Phoenix Smart Region ("The Connective") was launched in March 2019 for the purpose of improving quality of life for the 4.5 million residents living and working within Maricopa County. In doing so, the Connective brings together leadership from 22 cities and towns, higher education institutions, a regional planning authority, economic development organizations, a local not-for-profit and the private sector for the purposes of identifying and addressing key regional challenges.

Since its establishment, its leadership has worked hard to determine the most significant challenges facing the region. An in-depth roadmap suggested that mobility, access to sustainable water, energy solutions, and air quality were four of the most pressing challenges being faced by the region. Yes despite the need to make critical policy decisions and investments in addressing these challenges, very few of the cities and towns had access to metrics and key performance indicators necessary to make informed decisions for building out a smart and resilient region. This project sought to address that gap.

This project was initiated in July 2020 in response to a need identified by Connective leadership. During the month of July, four law school interns worked with members of the Connective to identify metrics that the affiliated cities and towns believed would provide valuable information that they could use in their decision-making. These metrics included those relating to economic activity, public health and safety, equity, sustainability and resilience.

In parallel with this activity, a member of the KER team identified 154 metrics associated with the Sustainable Development Goals. Themes included, for example, transportation, food security, digital access, smart buildings / energy / water, and environment and climate change. These were then mapped, where possible, to existing standards published by the International Organization for Standardization. Given the nature of this project, the metrics of interest were narrowed to resilience and sustainability metrics — of which there were 50.

Eleven cities within the Connective are members of the Valley Benchmarking Cities (VBC), a regional consortium focused on improving government performance. VBC has its own data dashboard, but data reported to the VBC is geared toward improving performance and innovation within the public sector and are not resilience measures.

Finding no overlap, the project is now focused on narrowing down the list of resilience metrics that shall be the most beneficial to decision-makers in the region and identifying the source of this data.

Access to reliably measured metrics will allow city and town governments to make informed, forward-thinking decisions in all aspects of municipal governance. By providing a discrete list of tailored metrics, this project will ensure that legislators, executives and managers at all levels of local government have access to easily digestible data that reflects the real world resilience and weaknesses of their municipality. The benefits of this data-driven decision-making to the communities served cannot be understated. Those benefits can even extend beyond the initial end-users as they become models for a system of data collection, publication and utilization that will later be followed by other municipalities to improve their own resilience frameworks.

The particular importance of bringing this project to life in the Greater Phoenix region is simple:  mitigating the loss of scarce natural resources in the form of water, ensuring continued and reliable access to energy (particularly during summer months when heat leads inescapably to grid-breaking demand), and further cementing Arizona and the Phoenix metropolitan area's position as a leader in smart and sustainable city initiatives.