The Rockefeller Foundation today launched a $100 million competition to make 100 cities worldwide more resilient to natural disasters. The plan? Help these cities hire a “chief resilience officer,” a new type of government official in charge of preparing for and recovering from floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and the like.

The competition, called the “100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge,” will have three rounds. Rockefeller will start accepting applications this August and plans to announce the winners in 2015. Each city involved will have to outline a practical resiliency plan, highlighting the needs of poor and vulnerable residents. Winners will receive support and funding — the amount will vary by the needs of each city — to create and sustain those plans, plus hire chief resilience officers to carry them out.

“It is our hope that investing in 100 cities worldwide will further catalyze this field,” Rockefeller President Judith Rodin said in a press release, “ensuring that our urban areas are places of increased opportunity and are resilient for the next 100 years and beyond.”

“Resilience” became a somewhat mainstream political issue after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast last year. In November, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo established, with the help of Rockefeller, four different commissions to review the state’s infrastructure and its ability to deal with climate change. Focusing mostly on the New York City metro area, the commissions found the need for improvement in a number of areas including energy, transportation and land use. Recommendations ranged from reverting parts of the industrial waterfront into oyster beds, to ramping up a text message system for communicating with residents during emergencies.

New York was the first U.S. city to have an office of sustainability, led by special advisor Douglas Foy, with the goal of making its infrastructure both environmentally friendly and economically viable. A chief resiliency officer, though also concerned with issues like climate change, would have a specific focus on disaster preparedness.

This sort of urgency to better prepare for climate change is felt around the globe. As Dustin Rossa chronicled in a Forefront story last month, after Bangkok flooded in October 2011 the Thai capital had to rely on citizen-led efforts in the face of an inadequate government response. These informal networks not only aided residents, during the crisis, but also helped clean, repair and fortify neighborhoods against future disasters.

Update: Mary Rowe, as vice president and managing director of the Municipal Arts Society of New York, has worked with cities on issues of social, economic and environmental resilience. When reached by phone, Rowe applauded the Rockefeller competition for acknowledging resilience as a key issue that affects cities everywhere.

“This has to be a top priority for cities around the world,” Rowe said. “These things that we used to relegate — ‘that’s a particular experience of the developing world, that’s a particular experience of the developed world’ — these are shared experiences now.”

Hear more about the competition from Rodin in the video below.