My paper about resilient SIDS cities is published
- By Gareth Byatt
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- 20 May, 2024
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This paper focuses on ways to implement measures that will foster resilient and dynamic cities in SIDS.

Almost half of Small Island Developing States' (SIDS) populations reside in urban areas. Research into urban resilience and urban planning tends to focus on cities in large nations, and only a relatively small amount of specific research on SIDS cities currently exists. However, much of the general urban resilience research is applicable to SIDS, as long as context is considered.
This paper focuses on ways to implement measures that will foster resilient and dynamic cities in SIDS. Ensuring good policy action to build, maintain and continuously improve these cities is key to achieving sustainable development and resilient prosperity as set out in the Outcome Document of the Fourth International Conference for Small Island Developing States (SIDS4).

We held very interesting in-person discussions about how my Urban 2.0 framework and system can be used by cities and towns around the world, and also the release of the UNDRR Global Assessment Report, Special Report 2024, which I was delighted to contribute towards.
The municipality of Bordeaux is continuing to pursue some excellent work in urban resilience, which I will be profiling in due course...

With growing challenges like climate change, debt burdens, and dwindling resources, they desperately need an actionable, doable, and ambitious roadmap for the next decade. 2024 is an important year for SIDS, with the SIDS4 conferencetaking place in May.
You can access details about the Forum on the Island Innovation website, here.


You can read edition #1 here. This first edition is an introduction to our work, containing a summary of some of the work we are undertaking, links to case studies and interviews with people about different aspects of avoiding disasters.


We held a very interesting in-person round table discussion with citizens about how disasters can be avoided.
The municipality of Bordeaux is pursuing some excellent resilience work, which I will be profiling in due course...

We reviewed approaches being taken to prevent hazards from turning into disasters, including examples and how innovation is helping countries, cities and communities prevent adverse fallouts from hazard events.
You can access the webinar and download all presentations here.


The December 2022 edition, which covers a wide variety of infrastructure-related topics, is available here...

The purpose and objective of our work is to inspire action from governments, funders, businesses, the non-profit sector, and the public by compiling, verifying and sharing compelling good-news examples of potential disasters which could have happened, but did not, because action was proactively taken before it was too late. We hope to inspire the use of Earth observations and connecting Earth systems to act cooperatively, at a global and a local level, to avoid disasters.
NASA is of course known globally as an organisation that helps the human race to move forward with space exploration.
They also have an Earth Science team. The Disasters program part of NASA's Earth Science Applied Sciences Programuses Earth-observing data and applied research to improve the prediction of, preparation for, response to and recovery from hazards and disasters around the world.
More information will be made available about this project during 2023, and 2024 (including a dedicated website for the project).