Taking part in an Urban Talk for UNDP
- By Gareth Byatt
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- 30 Nov, 2022
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An Urban Talk focusing on cities and climate change...

My piece focused on various aspects of urban resilience and how systems thinking can help us to understand, unpack and design initiatives, programmes and projects to improve the resilience of cities and towns.
We also had extremely interesting presentations from Professor Bharat Dahiya, Director of the Research Center for Sustainable Development and Innovation at the School of Global Studies, Thammasat University, on strengthening disaster risk governance, plus Armen Chilingaryan, Programme Manager, and Elen Sahradyan, Public Policy Innovation Lead, at UNDP Armenia on implementing a more sustainable and fairer economic model, and Ljubica Teofilovska, Project Manager, at UNDP North Macedonia, on better urban future planning.
For more information about this online event, please contact me. A link to the UNDP Europe and Central Asia Urban Talks series summaries is here.
My thanks go to the UNDP team for organising an excellent session - especially to Rajeev Issar for hosting the event, ably supported by Darini Vedarattiname, Cansu Demir and Svetla Baeva.

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...

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).

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...