Built to Endure: A Smart Guide for US Cities to Build Resilient Infrastructure That Lasts
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2026-02-18
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Resilience is needed for every community to thrive in a world at increased risk of natural disasters. But small and medium-sized communities don’t need expensive analyses or teams of people to get started. Resilience is achievable—even for lean municipal teams—when people, sound governance, and systems thinking are supported by increasingly accessible digital tools that help inform decisions and strengthen community outcomes.
A new guidebook from Duke University, Bentley Systems, AECOM, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Microsoft offers practical, step-by-step advice for small and midsized communities to integrate resilience into their infrastructure systems. Featuring eight case studies from cities in the United States and abroad, the guidebook is meant for immediate use in the real world. The guidebook also includes a separate section—Getting Started: Practical Entry Points for Local Governments—that will jump-start the systems thinking needed to truly achieve resilience.
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Losos, Elizabeth, Rory Linehan, Jennifer Goupil, Nick Novelli, Hannah Prior and Amelia Burnett (2026). Built to Endure: A Smart Guide for US Cities to Build Resilient Infrastructure That Lasts. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/34274.
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Elizabeth Losos
Elizabeth Losos is an executive in residence at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability and adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment. Her work focuses on how to promote sustainable and resilient infrastructure through policy research on infrastructure standards, environmental and social impacts, and enabling conditions. Dr. Losos also heads the ISLE Initiative, a global network of learning hubs to build sustainable infrastructure capacity through case-based peer learning. She is co-convener of the Resilience Roadmap Project, an initiative to support US federal agencies and their partners in building equitable climate resilience. She also is the Duke lead for Infrastructure for Good, a research initiative of Economist Impact in partnership with Deloitte and the Nicholas Institute; the centerpiece of the program is a barometer that compares infrastructure ecosystems in countries around the world.
Losos formerly was president and CEO of the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a global consortium of universities and research institutes with the mission of promoting education, research, and the responsible use of natural resources in the tropics. Prior to her tenure with OTS, Losos was the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Tropical Forest Science, a global network of large-scale forest demography programs.
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