16th UCL Risk and Disaster Reduction annual conference

Good morning everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here. Been working with University College London now for several years, including on early warning systems. I'll talk a little bit more about that.

So to be able to speak to you today about disaster risk reduction is absolutely an honour. I would like to start though, by asking you a question. I have been in London now for two days and it's a very simple question. How many of you think that London is prepared for a warming city, warming planet, anybody?

I don't see one hand raised. It's not just London, but if you think about it, London's one of the wealthiest cities in the world. And yet we can see all around us that the metro, the Tube lines, the buses, are they really ready for temperatures like we're facing today? We see this as an extreme event, but what if these temperatures become the norm?

It's not unlikely. And if London cannot handle necessarily the impact of this extreme heat, what does this mean for cities in Africa and Asia and other parts of the world where perhaps they don't have the same economic viability as London does? So that's really what I want to talk to you about today, what I see as a real paradox. We now know more than ever before what it takes to reduce risk.

We know that early warning systems work. We know that resilient infrastructure makes good economic sense. We know that risk informed urban planning needs to become the norm because it will not only save lives but will preserve economies and livelihoods. We know that preparedness and social protection and anticipatory action can prevent hazards, simple hazards, from becoming disasters with loss and damage impacts.

And yet disaster losses continue to rise. When we talk about disaster risk reduction, we often see it as a story of doom and gloom. But I want to start with some good news, because there really is good news. I wouldn't say disaster risk reduction has been a failure, but it has been a story of partial success.

And the good news is that over the past 30 years, mortality from disasters has been declining. And this does reflect the investment that's been made in preparedness, in early warning systems, in better building codes. If you live on the coast of Mozambique or Madagascar, these are areas that are exposed to recurrent cyclones. Your chances of dying are roughly 1/3 than what they were 15 years ago.

So we are making progress. In the 1920s, disasters killed an average of 500,000 people a year. This is now down to about 70,000 people. However, we absolutely cannot be complacent and we can't be complacent for two reasons.

Single event mortality remains very high. Boxing Day tsunami 2004, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar 2008, the Haiti earthquake in 2010. Maybe just pause for a moment. As Ting mentioned, I am a humanitarian by background and it was covering the Haiti earthquake in 2010 as part of the UN Response team that made me change my career from working on responding to disasters to preventing disasters.

Because here you could seriously understand why the lack of investment in resilient infrastructure, the lack of enforcement of building codes led to over 200,000 people being killed. So this progress that I'm referring to in average mortality is not protecting US against these low probability but very high impact events. And these events are not becoming less likely, earthquakes for example. But the second reason why we cannot be complacent is because deaths by extreme heat are linked to extreme heat are certainly being undercounted now.

UNDRR maintains the Global Loss and Damage Tracking System, which helps countries analyse and understand the losses and damages being incurred by disaster events. And as of last year, only six countries were referring to extreme heat as a disaster and counting those deaths. And we know that people who come into the hospital with a heart attack that may be induced by the extreme heat are not necessarily counted as an extreme heat death. So we we don't actually understand fully yet what is the mortality associated with extreme heat.

And just yesterday I was reading on the BBC, France, the country where I lived, had counted 40 deaths by drowning. Would these be counted in official statistics as extreme heat deaths? Not necessarily. But they were drownings because people got so hot that they jumped into rivers and they jumped into lakes and couldn't swim or had a shock from the cold water.

Nonetheless, the deaths were associated with extreme heat. So while we are making good progress on mortality, we still have to be very aware of extreme heat and of course these one off high impact events. But what's the bad news? Well, the bad news is that while we're seeing good progress on mortality, the economic losses are growing.

And between 2001 and 2020, reported direct disaster costs more than doubled. So we now say that direct disaster costs are around 200 billion a year. Again, we know that this is an underestimation, but just for comparison purposes, that's also the envelope for the development budget globally. And the question really is who is absorbing the impact of these losses.

And I can answer that by saying it's the lower income countries, it's the most vulnerable countries that face the greatest and the disproportionate share of disaster losses. So disaster losses in low income countries average can average up to 1 to 2% of GDP compared with 0.1% in a developed country. And just to give you an example of this, the Haiti earthquake, which I mentioned early, earlier the cost was about 120% of the country's GDP. And by comparison, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, which was the costliest disaster ever in Japan, amounted to about 3.6% of Japan's GDP.

And of course, the country was much better able to absorb the shock. So this asymmetry really matters because the disaster risk is growing due to climate change and other factors in the poorer countries and they do not have the capacity to absorb this. So it has an impact on their development pathways, clearly. But let's be clear, these direct costs are really just a fraction of what the actual impact of disasters is.

We're not counting really what the true impact of disasters are. We actually estimate $2.3 trillion is the estimate of the true annual cost of disasters. And that's because when you calculate the cost of a disaster, you calculate, for example, the destruction of a road and how much it costs for that road to be repaired. But you're not calculating necessarily the lost revenue from businesses that cannot use the road, or the schools that cannot operate, or the hospitals that cannot operate.

Now, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure estimates that economic losses from service disruptions after a disaster are on an average about 7 1/2 times higher than the direct cost of physical damage. And I can give you more statistics, but waking up this morning and going outside to get a coffee made me ask myself the question, how much is this heat wave in Europe costing us? What do we see happening? Schools are closing earlier, tube lines have broken down.

I saw that yesterday, Flooding is occurring. Do we actually know what the cost of being unprepared and unable to manage this heat wave will be? We don't know it yet, but I can tell you that the 2003 heat wave in Europe, which led to around 70,000 deaths, that's the estimate cost $13 billion indirect losses. But we haven't been able to calculate what the indirect losses have actually been.

And that's something that we really need to focus more attention on. So why is disaster risk increasing? So this is the DRR department. This is very obvious to you.

It's the intersection of hazard exposure and vulnerability. All three are moving in the wrong direction, actually. So climate change obviously is intensifying the magnitude, but also the unpredictability of extreme events. And I see this everyday countries telling me that their cyclone season is starting earlier or is hitting parts of the country that has never had cyclones before.

So their preparedness isn't really matching the risk yet. Exposure is growing faster than the population and between 2000 and 2015, populations living in high flood risk areas grew by 24% and vulnerability is now structurally embedded. I'd like to talk a little bit about informal settlements because this is where I see a great risk. These informal settlements where the poorest communities live are often in the most hazard exposed areas in cities, minimal quality building standards, lack of access to services, weak social protection.

So this equation, vulnerability and exposure and the hazards drawn up by climate change all moving in the wrong direction. But let me pause a moment because probably one of the greatest risks we see is what I call the largest urbanisation experiment in human history. So by 2050, approximately 5.2 billion people will live in cities, and that's about 70% of humanity. And currently that figures about 4.4 billion.

So this additional footprint, if you want, this urban footprint is the equivalent of 10 times the city of Cairo. The secondary city is where the story is being built. And I, I want to emphasise that it's not Mumbai necessarily or Lagos, although they matter too. Obviously, it's these cities of 1 to 5 million people that are growing at 3 to 5% a year and they're often growing in a very unplanned way.

The planning systems are not keeping pace with the growth. The building codes may exist on paper, but they're not being enforced necessarily. The poor, as mentioned before, are systematically being pushed to the edges of the city where the floodwaters may arrive 1st and the shade arrives less so their exposure is growing. 1.1 billion people currently live in informal settlements.

They're living on the floodplains. They're living on eroding hilltops. This is not a future risk. This is the risk that we see today in these cities and they're not just facing one risk.

This looks like a bit, maybe a bit terrifying this slide, but it's really this compounded risk landscape that is most concerning. If you look just at the question of heat that we talked about today and it's severe heat wave coincides with power outages, floods, as we know, rail disruptions which we've heard about, pressure on hospitals. So there's cascading hazards, there's cascading vulnerabilities that are happening and I see these cascading risk acting on what I would call 3 fault lines simultaneously. The first, as I've already mentioned, is this rapid, but it's unplanned urbanisation, concentrating people and assets in hazard prone areas faster than the governance systems of these cities can or will manage.

The second is social inequality. This determines who lives where, who has insurance, who has savings, what type of houses they live in and whose neighbourhoods have trees and whose have none. And the third is that the infrastructure we're living in was built for a different climate. The systems were designed decades ago under assumptions that simply no longer hold true.

I see so many of you fanning right now in this room and we have air conditioning, so imagine what it's like for people who are out on the streets right now or working in buildings that are not air conditioned. Just aside anecdote, I'm here also for London Climate Week and our event on extreme heat was cancelled yesterday at the London School of Economics because of extreme heat. So obviously our infrastructure is not keeping base with reality. However, let's be honest, look at the cost of this.

We we estimate that the replacement cost of infrastructure built in high risk zones over the next 15 years is estimated $1.5 trillion. Having said that, this is probably the most critical point. These secondary cities, they're being built today. So it's the decisions that are being made today that will impact the future.

So there is a window of time right now to act and this is what I hope will be able to help influence. It ultimately comes down to decisions that are being made. It's a question of choice and everything you see on the left side is a choice. Everything you see on the right side is a decision.

It's a choice. So obviously risk informed urban planning critical using hazard data, probabilistic risk models, community knowledge, Indigenous knowledge to decide where the city should grow, what gets built and who gets protected. Ageing and fragile infrastructure. This is the accumulated result of decades of poor maintenance.

But we also know that investing in resilient infrastructure costs on an average just 3% more upfront, but the savings in maintenance and repair costs can be 50% or more in high risk locations. And the third one is something that we work on quite extensively is the early warning systems. Not having an early warning system is ultimately a policy choice. It's not a priority for many countries.

And you may have heard of the Early Warnings for All initiative, which is the UN LED initiative to put early warning systems in place because it's one of the most financially sound adaptation investments that can be made. It's cost effective and we know that $800 million sounds like a lot of money, but in terms of global investment and early warning is estimated to prevent losses of up to $16 billion annually. And yet we're still struggling to get early warning systems financed in many countries. So to make choices, you need to be able to understand your risk.

And this is a key question for us right now. How do we ensure that we truly understand risk and not just understand hazards? We can now predict where a Category 4 hurricane will make landfall within 50 kilometres, 72 hours in advance. So this is tremendous achievement that's been made.

And if you look, you can see all of the investments that have gone into hazard intelligence, millions and millions of dollars, even more than that estimated up to $10 billion invested in understanding hazards. But look at the right side, vulnerability intelligence, it's under invested, it's incomplete, it's sitting in different line ministries. And why is this important? Well, I come from the US and Switzerland, but in the US, the National Weather Service can issue a tornado warning.

In fact, I'm from the state of Indiana, which is a low level, you know, no mountainous areas. It's where tornadoes happened the entire time. So I'm very used to tornado warnings. And they can issue a tornado warning with a median lead time of 14 minutes.

So that gives you enough time to take shelter and to go underground if you have that or hide behind a desk or wherever. But the fact is, is that the tornado striking a mobile home has 10 times more the mortality of a tornado striking a home that's made of brick. So the gap is not actually the early warning, it's the housing stock, social vulnerability indices. And this combines indicators of poverty, disability, sometimes language isolation, housing quality.

This has more of a determinate factor on mortality from disasters than the actual hazard information itself. And this has been peer reviewed. And yet this is often the information that's lacking in countries when it comes to putting in place effective disaster risk reduction measures. So let me go back to extreme heat.

And extreme heat is something that's taking up a lot of our time and attention for the reasons I've mentioned. If you're familiar with the Sendai framework, you know that one of the targets is to reduce mortality, to reduce economic losses as well. We've bent the curve and it's going back up again because of extreme heat. We're uncomfortable by the heat.

Today I was uncomfortable coming to work. But for many Londoners it's not that it is actually life threatening, as I'm sure you are aware, if you're an elderly person living on the top floor of an apartment building, your life could be threatened by this. So extreme heat is a systemic risk that's affecting societies. And the impact of this extreme heat is not just felt by the temperature, obviously, but it's by the vulnerability and the consequences are extreme.

Now, we talked about how we don't actually know the exact figures yesterday at the climate change, but the Climate Action Week, I heard two different lectures talking about 500,000 people. But we know that that's a gross estimation. But beyond that, we also have other figures that should really worry economic ministers and planning ministers. And there's about 2.4 billion workers whose lives are put at risk because of extreme heat.

And this could reduce the global working hours by an estimated 80 million full-time jobs by 2030. And the economic losses that are estimated by 2030 by extreme heat are in the range of around $2.4 trillion. Cities, of course, are particularly vulnerable, and that's obviously because of the urban heat island effects, because sometimes cities can be 8 to 12° hotter than the surrounding rural areas. The challenge is that for many countries, what how they're managing extreme heat is by putting in place an extreme heat action plan.

It's essentially a response plan. They take action once the heat occurs. They put really nice messages out in the tube about drinking water or they close the schools. But the problem is much more long term than that.

And so cities and countries, they need not just short term response measures, they need long term transformation plans. How are they going to transform their cities to deal with extreme heat? And yet we are not seeing that really happening in many countries yet. This is just a very simple diagram showing you the difference in one city, fictional city.

Obviously neighbourhood A has everything you need, high tree cover, access to cooling, better health outcomes expected. Neighbourhood B, and you can bet it will be a poor neighbourhood has low tree cover, it doesn't have insulated housing or so in other words, the temperatures just get, you know, soaked through the the the building and social isolation. Now going back to Paris during the 2003 heat wave mortality in these high density, low income arrondissements. So these are neighbourhoods were up to four times higher than in the wealthier neighbourhoods.

And in Chicago, it's actually the area I'm from. The 1995 heat wave killed over 700 people in five days. But what was interesting about that particular heat wave is that some of the studies afterwards show that neighbourhood social cohesion was actually more important. It was a more important predictor of mortality than temperature or even age or health status.

Now I live in France. I live in a little village in France. And starting a few days ago, we received messages from the local government to check on our neighbours, had a list of the elderly people living in the village and made sure that if they were neighbour that we were, you know, the healthy younger people, maybe not so young, but we could go and check on them and they put in place the system. And so this is quite interesting that France has developed a system of social cohesion protection as a means of managing extreme heat.

This isn't happening everywhere yet, but I think it's probably something that all cities, including London, needs to look into. OK, so let me just talk a moment beyond the hazard about how cities are shaping risk. And here I just want to give two very stark examples and I'll I'll do this rather quickly. So I'm sure all of you are aware that Jakarta is one of the most risk prone cities in the world.

River flooding, coastal flooding, sea level rise, etcetera, hazards that might have been manageable A decade ago or even 2 decades ago. They've just become increasingly severe and costly, and the impacts are significant. Major floods repeatedly lead to displacement. The scale of the challenge has become so strong for Jakarta that the decision is to move the capital out of Jakarta to a new capital in Nusantara.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that Indonesia is not doing good work on disaster risk reduction. They really are doing good work. The problem is this accumulation of risk over time has become simply unmanageable. They cannot leave the capital there.

So politicians are moving, but the people will remain in the city and exposed to multiple risks. On the other hand, I don't know if any of you recognise the city on the right. Anybody. Yes, absolutely, Medellín. 

Medellín is has become really a leader in urban resilience and disaster risk reduction. It used to have one of the highest death rates from crime and this is a city that made a number of decisions that has really turned around the city in many ways. They developed an integrated approach, risk informed early warning systems, infrastructure improvements, ecosystem restoration.

It mapped hazard prone areas, but it also stabilised vulnerable slopes and it was on these slope areas where the poorest populations live. So you can see that they established a transport system so that these isolated communities became closer. Perhaps most interestingly is that they established green corridors throughout the city, roads and pathways, and they've managed to reduce the temperature in the city throughout the city by two degrees. So this is a city that just made different choices and the it's now cited largely as a success story.

Doesn't mean that the climate hazards have disappeared, but the ability of the city to manage them has improved significantly. Now I'm going to just take you through a fictional case study here. Two cities, Nakhara and Mwinda, that I've made-up. I mean they're actually composites drawn from very documented patterns across rapidly urbanising cities in the Global South.

So Nakhara is the secondary city, as I've mentioned before, that's where our concern lies. 3 million people, lower middle income country situated across the floodplain. It knows its risk profile because an NGO did a risk assessment a few years ago, was an NGO consortium that did this for free, but none of the recommendations have been acted upon. Mwinda is also a secondary city and it also has had a risk assessment carried out, similar conditions, comparable population site.

But Mwinda made a different decision. It decided to act on the recommendations. I'd like to just see what will happen over the next few decades of these two cities. So Nakhara 2025, already very vulnerable, informal settlements are expanding faster than infrastructure by 2030.

The expansion continues. The population continues to grow. A major flood coincides with the heat wave, very probable by 2040. Vulnerability has become systemic.

Insurance costs rise sharply, infrastructure failures become more common. And by 2050, the city has fallen into what we call a recovery trap. This is where every crisis is consuming the resources that is needed for development. Instead, they're being used for recovery.

And this recovery trap, it's not a theoretical construct. We're actually seeing it in parts of the world today, parts of Bangladesh, parts of Haiti, parts of the Sahel urban corridor as well. So disaster response is actually crowding out the development investment needed to ensure that these cities can grow in a resilient manner. Now let's look at Mwinda.

Mwinda had a very similar profile. In 2025 they completed a risk assessment, but then they started to develop risk-informed planning processes, Spatial plan was updated across sectoral government committee was established. And critically important because risk doesn't sit in one ministry. You need to have the finance, the education, the energy departments, all working collaboratively and often this governance mechanism is lacking.

By 2028, Mwinda had established an urban heat resilience programme and notice I don't say a heat response plan, I'm talking about a resilience programme really looking at the long term investments needed to ensure the city can withstand the impact of heat. Trees were planted and critically, the insurance market remained functional because the risk profile was understood by the city and it was being managed. So by 2040, the economic confidence in the city had grown. Private investment was continuing and the city was beginning to attract or continuing to attract the capital that was needed to transform its economy.

So by 2050, you are seeing resilient growth in Mwinda. Of course, it still faces climate hazards, but the point is it's better able to manage those impacts. The point I want to make is the choices that are being made in Nakhara and Mwinda are not in 2050. These choices are being made today.

And this is where our concern lies is because are the right choices being made in all the cities about how to ensure and how to protect the future for the next generations? I mentioned insurability from Mwinda and for Nakhara, because one of the greatest risks that we're seeing right now if the city is not making the right decisions in a timely manner is that the private sector and the capital markets will make those decisions. For US insurance, they don't have ideology that's necessarily driving them. They have actuarial models.

They're looking at historical data, they're looking at probabilistic models. And when they withdraw from a market, they are telling us that the risk have become unmanageable at any viable premium price. This is not a future scenario. This is actually happening today in the United States.

In 2023, State Farm and Allstate, these are two big insurance companies stopped writing new homeowner insurance policies in California, citing wildfire risk and the inability to price the insurance sustainably. And State Farm announced plans to non-insure 1,000,000 new homes. Now this is a problem to non, excuse me, to non-insure existing policies by 2028. So people who actually have policies and I can tell you my sister is one of those people.

She lives in Glendale, CA where they had a huge fires there. If they can't insure their homes, what happens? I mean, there's a tremendous risk associated with living in a high risk zone and you don't have insurance in parts of northern Australia. Some coastal areas and flood prone areas are also uninsurable today.

So without insurances you can't get mortgages and then the formal property market stagnate and then the property taxes decline. So there's a cascading impact. This is the market telling us that the risk is too high right now and we need to reduce it. However, as I said before, not everything about Disaster Risk Reduction is doom and gloom.

And what I really enjoy talking about is that cities are really emerging as innovation labs and we're seeing some great progress taking place in cities. So there really is reason to be optimism for optimism. And I think your conference today is talking about reimagining cities on one end of the spectrum. What we are seeing is resilience does not always have to cost so much money.

There are some great examples of cities using green solutions and working through solutions such as urban reforestation in Freetown or Semarang, which is restoring mangroves which we know is so critical, Surat and Kampala preserving wetlands system. So these are nature based solutions that cost a fraction of the infrastructure costs and yet have tremendous impacts. And we're doing a lot to promote nature based solutions. On the other end of the spectrum, we are seeing amazing advances in AI and digital emerging technologies.

Singapore, for example, is using digital twins, combining AI 3D modelling to simulate floods, heat waves and infrastructure disruptions such as Singapore. We're seeing it in Japan as well. Rotterdam is also using digital twins. Rio de Janeiro has developed operations centres combining different types of technologies.

So innovation is occurring in cities across the spectrum from low income from low income cities to also cities that have the resources. But one of the greatest concerns we have is that we're not seeing it everywhere. It tends to be a question of leadership in cities tends to be where resources are graders that you're able to deploy the AI and the the digital technologies. So at the same time that there's all this innovation, we're also seeing a digital divide growing greater and greater between poorer countries, poorer cities and richer cities.

This is something we really want to address. One thing I would like to draw your attention to as I come to the end of this is a report that just came out by UNDRR and ITU called When Digital Systems Fail. So our cities are becoming increasingly digitalized. And with this, we are facing new risks that often cities are not managing.

It's not a question of when a major digital, it's not whether a major digital disruption will occur. It's just a question of when. And we've identified 3 risks that we feel cities are not yet really taking into account. So the first is the solar storms that could disable satellites.

The second is the fact that 99% of international data runs through submarine cables. And the third, again, we come back to extreme heat that could overwhelm data centres. Now, interestingly enough, we often put out these types of reports. This one attracted a lot of attention because cities are beginning to realise, governments are beginning to realise.

NASA contacted us, NATO contacted us. They're realising that this is a risk that cities have not prepared for and they have not planned for. So I just wanted to bring your attention to it because we often think about floods and other types of risk, digital risks should be much higher on the agenda that they currently are. So what is driving in action, just to conclude here?

Well, first of all, short termism, political cycles, risk reduction, investment tends to pay off over decades. Politicians have four to five years in office, sometimes shorter in this country in particular. So political cycles often are looking at what can I get, what can I demonstrate is my value add that's going to help me win the next election. And linked to this is invisible success.

You can't really see prevention. You don't see a disaster that doesn't occur. You don't have headline. This disaster did not occur because we had a great early warning system in place and no lives were lost.

No, it's the opposite. Third is this fragmented institution governments, it just all lies in different ministry. If you look at heat, you need education, you need health, you need transport, you need energy, you need so many different sectors of the governments working together. Who's pulling these sectors together?

Where's the leadership for this? Not impossible, we saw it happen during COVID, but often multi sectoral governance mechanisms are lacking. And the fourth point, which for me is probably the most important, is that the people who bear the greatest disaster risk, these informal settlement residents, outdoor workers, the elderly, poor, they're the not the ones that make the decisions. This is not incidental to the risk map.

I think it's what's actually driving it. They're voiceless, they're powerless. And so subsequently the decisions that are being made are not being made with their well-being in mind. So what is the UN doing about this?

Well, I can just talk about you and DRR, although certainly it's a whole of system approach to helping cities and countries. But some of the most important things that we're doing is we're really trying to help quantify the cost of inaction. So we have developed a risk and resilience metrics programme where we're looking at the annual average losses and the probable maximum losses from the five hazards that are driving up the most economic losses and really trying to help countries understand what they stand to lose if they don't invest in resilience. I mentioned the extreme heat risk management framework.

This is really trying to promote a cross sectoral multi scale approach to managing risk, not only in the short term for heat but in the long term. What are the transformations that society need to make early warnings for all? This is an important initiative which is trying to promote cities and countries, but mostly at the national level right now to scale up their multi hazard early warning systems. We are seeing improvements, but we're nowhere near where we want to be, which is to protect all people multi hazard early warning systems.

We're helping countries better track the losses and damages through delta resilience and resilient infrastructure, promoting this idea that this rather small 3% upfront additional cost to make your infrastructure resilient pays off in the long term. And finally, our Making Cities Resilient initiative, which now has over 1000 cities involved in it, which is really trying to look at how do you help cities develop resilience pathways. And importantly, we have about 50 cities that are what we call resilience hubs that are really making progress and helping cities learn from each other. So these are just some of the tools and I'm happy to share them with you.

So just to end, this is my analysis, personal analysis of what are the six things that smart cities are doing. Well, first of all, they're planning growth before it happens. And a lot of these secondary cities I talked about are waiting for growth to happen, but they're not ahead of it. They're just watching it happen.

And so really the spatial planning and urban planning, they're putting it at the forefront and they're using risk assessment and data. And secondly, they're putting vulnerability at the heart of decision making, not just hazard mapping, but really understanding the vulnerability. Third, they're building resilience into their infrastructure systems. And I think this is just so critical when you build a road, this is a 30 to 50 year decision, not a five year decision.

So you have to plan for that. And so much of this we see not happening. Fourth, they govern across sectors, not within silos, a huge challenge, but governance goes to the core of disaster risk reduction. Fifth is they make the private sector A resilience partner.

They're not simply on the sidelines. They're actually core to this. And the sixth is they are investing in foresight. They're really trying to understand what does the future hold for them rather than putting all their resources into a fund to respond to disasters after they occur.

So let me just finish by thanking you and just to say that the choices that these cities are facing are very real and they're happening right now. They're happening today somewhere, somewhere in some country, a city official is making a decision about where the next neighbourhood is going to be built. And in another city, someplace else on the planet, a budget is being approved that's either going to lock in resilience or is actually going to expose the citizens to risk for the next decades. And here in London, as we experience one of the hottest days in our history, we're reminded that resilience is a challenge, not for somebody else's cities, but for our own cities.

And the future is not really something that happens to cities. It's what we build together. So these decisions that are shaping our futures are happening today. And it's critically important that we all influence those decisions.

So thank you very much.

[Applause]

Are there any discounts on the ticket price? 
The registration fee is waived for current UCL RDR students and staff.

Is funding available to support delegate participation in the conference?I'm afraid we do not have funding for delegate registration fees, travel or accommodation. 

Will the event be live-streamed? 
No, this is an in-person only event. 

Will the event be recorded and shared afterwards? 
This will be confirmed nearer the time, for selected sessions only. 

Will there be any outputs from the conference? 
We will share a conference report over the summer and there will be information available about the hackathon outputs.

Is there storage for my belongings at the venue? 
I'm afraid we do not have a luggage storage area or cloakroom at this venue. 

Is there space to work at the venue? 
Yes. There are public seating areas just outside the conference room suitable for desk work and phone/video calls.