The key role of place and destination brand strategists in promoting place resilience as a response to the climate emergency

The scale and nature of the Climate Emergency requires urgent action by places to mitigate and prevent its worsening impacts. They need to substantially increase and strengthen their resilience. If left unchecked, these impacts could cause irreversible damage to places damaging their brand identity and offer.

Because of its global scale and far-reaching consequences, mitigating the impact of the climate emergency must now be a key consideration in building the resilience of places and a key element of their place branding strategies.

Malcolm Allan, Special Observer for TPBO and Co-founder of the Place Brand Academy, has shared valuable insights on the importance of building place resilience in the face of the climate emergency and as a key determinant of place brand strategy.

Photo by Nikola Tomasic on Unsplash

Increasing place resilience requires a response to the climate emergency

According to The Place Brand Observer, how places and destinations address climate change mitigation greatly affects their offer, long-term sustainability, brand identity, and reputation.

Target audiences, including residents, businesses, investors and visitors, have choices about where to live, work, study, invest, or visit. Faced with growing climate risks, they are asking legitimate, probing questions: How is my city responding to climate threats? How is this destination building resilience and safeguarding its future? The answers strongly influence their decisions.

To remain competitive, places and their brand strategies must actively increase their resilience, especially taking action to address the impacts of the Climate Emergency. This means highlighting real actions that governments - national, regional, city and local - are taking, or planning to reduce climate risks, enhance sustainability, and strengthen resilience.

Such actions might include:

• Increasing the de-carbonising of urban settlements.

• Increasing the sustainability of places, e.g. through improved and increased green energy generation, efficiency and management.

• Green and sustainable tourism and destination development.

• Harnessing the internet for sustainable resilience planning.

  
  

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of place resilience. 

It exposed vulnerabilities in many places worldwide, from poor preparedness and slow responses to confusing policy guidance.  At the same time, some cities implemented green recovery programs that not only reduced the impact of the pandemic but also enhanced climate resilience. These places became more attractive and positioned themselves to embrace the “next normal”, rather than returning to the “old normal”.

The role of place and destination brand strategists in promoting place resilience as a response to the climate emergency

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the most evident challenges faced by place branding professionals were:

• Intense competition among localities to attract the attention and spending of target audiences.

• The ability of key stakeholders to coordinate in developing, managing, investing in, and promoting the locality’s offer, including tourism, culture, or investment attraction.

  
  

But, once the pandemic hit, they faced an additional challenge, and responsibility, both practical and strategic: to support and encourage localities in planning and taking action to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic, while also convincing target audiences that the locality was safe and remained open for business.

Places responses to the pandemic - ranging from denial or minimization to comprehensive vaccination programmes - provide lessons on how to take action to increase their resilience in the face of the Climate Emergency

What specific actions should place branders take?

Drawn from our assessment of actions places treating the Climate Emergency seriously, there are many ways in which place branders can encourage politicians and key stakeholders to incorporate increasing resilience into their place development and brand strategies. 

Examples include:

• Persuading your colleagues and political masters of the importance and urgency of taking active action to build the resilience of your place in the face of these threats and the importance of communicating this honestly to your target market audiences.

• Identifying who, among your colleagues, has knowledge of the known and potential impacts of the Climate Emergency on your place and any action being currently taken or being planned to mitigate its impacts.

• Significantly increasing your own knowledge of the many ways that the Climate Emergency is already impacting on places like yours and what those places are doing about it. It’s no shame to learn from others ahead in the game.

• Conducting, with colleagues, an audit of the known and potential impacts that the Climate Emergency could have, or already has had, on your place; and, in doing so, identify who are the climate change deniers and the climate change realists in your midst. 

  This audit could include, for example, the extent of damage from bush fires, storm flood damage, poor flood water management, the extent of house building in flood plains, the scale of health problems in your population being created by pollution, the chief polluters in your place, the scale of carbon being released into the atmosphere by them, the scale of retrofitting older housing stock required, its insulation and its heating systems, changing from fossil fuels to green energy powered public transport, etc.

• Then, conducting an audit of the action already being taken to mitigate those challenges (such as the examples in the above point) and identify where no action or little action has been taken to date and assess the risks of not doing so. 

  
  

A number of studies indicate that the costs of taking mitigation action are likely to be considerably less than dealing with the damage of increased impacts of the climate emergency. For example, ask the major polluters in your place to share their plans and actions to reduce their level of pollution and celebrate and promote those actively committed to net zero carbon emissions by declared dates. 

In taking part in this audit activity your role should be to ensure that your colleagues, your political masters and your key stakeholders are being completely honest in their identification of potential impacts, in identifying the scale of the action currently being taken and the scale of the action likely to be required now and in the future to build the resilience of your place. This cannot be the equivalent of “green-washing”.

In summary, the development, implementation and promotion of place branding strategies can play a crucial role in promoting and informing climate change mitigation as a core element of increased place resilience. 

You can communicate to policymakers and local leaders the importance of building communities resilient to climate impacts; understand and promote resilience-building initiatives as part of the place or destination’s value proposition; and learn from the experiences of other localities to strengthen brand identity and reputation, positioning the place as a sustainable and resilient destination and as a place to live and work.

Thanks to Chi Ho Anh for her work on this blog post.

The next article in this series on place branding and building resilience to the climate emergency will take a closer look at concrete actions cities and destinations can implement to boost urban resilience, drastically cut carbon emissions, and reduce pollution-related health risks.