UN-Habitat Arena - Climate adaptation, biodiversity, and resilient construction (WUF13)

Hi.
Hi everyone.
Thank you for being here.
I think always this hour during the day, it's very difficult to be awake.
I hope this panel have a lot of information for you.
We are going to talk about climate adaptation.
Biodiversity and resilence construction.
Hopefully, this panel has a lot of information that we like to hear and I am really happy to introduce you some beautiful girls and a very professional person who has a lot of work in these adventures about resence cities and resilient constructions.
I will introduce first the first panelist, which is from Brazil.
She's a sustainable Director of special projects in the Minister of Cities in Brazil.
Thank you for being here, Alice.
Do you want me to tell you, Alice or Ali? Alice, is okay? Alice for you.
Then we are going to hear about Maria.
Maria is the municipality Secretariat at Cali.
Thank you for being here, Maria.
Then we are going to hear about Cuba.
Thank you, Evis for being here.
Then we are going to hear about Cherry, who is the General Director of Housing Infrastructure Communities of Canada.
Thank you for being here.
This panel is going to have two moments.
The first one is about a small presentation.
To talk about what are your work and your projects and some examples about how you are working in your own communities, in your own countries.
Then I am going to have some direct questions to tell you more specifically, what are you doing in your work.
First, if you think it's okay, we can start with Brazil.
Hello, good afternoon.
Thank you, Martha and thank you, UN Habitat for inviting the Ministry of Cities of Brazil to be here today and present some cases that we are working with UN Habitat.
I'm starting to say that Brazil considers climate adaptation as a fundamental priority, especially in light of the increasingly frequent extreme climate events affecting cities and vulnerable communities across the country.
In this context, the National Climate plan approved last year establishes strategies that connect climate adaptation with social justice.
For Brazil, a country that still faces major infrastructure defies, resilience cannot be discussed separately from inclusion and equity because the most vulnerable population who suffers the greatest impacts of the climate change.
One of our national targets under the climate plan is that by 2035, Brazil is providing structural disaster risk reduction measures to at least 4 million people exposed to geo ological disaster risk and to support this implementation, the reestablishment of the Ministry of cities and the creation of the National Secretariat for Pipheers that works with slums and informal areas have represented important institutional advances.
These initiatives reinforced the understanding that the climate resilience in number areas must be built through integrated territorial policies focused on vulnerable communities.
In this context, the Perera Viv program launched in 2024 under a new cycle of investments of public investments represents an important innovation in addressing social spatial inequalities in urban peripheries.
This program recognized that isolated infrastructure intervention are insufficient to respond to the complexity of these territories.
So instead it promotes an integrated territorial approach that articulates housing, sanitation, mobility, environmental improvements, social service, and risk management policies based on local realities and community participation.
A central element of this model is the action plan, which will be developed by the UN Habitat with the partnership with UN habitat.
The action plan serves as the main planning instrument, defining intervention and strategies through technical assessment combined with direct participation from local communities.
This participatory and placet based methodology strengthens local ownership and insurance, ensures that solutions are adapted to the specific dynamics of each territory.
One example is in Maui that we are working in a city on the states of San Paolo.
Significant investments in infrastructure and urban improvements are planned.
In the first phase alone, approximately 7,000 people are expected to be benefit as part of the community based strategy, Piphelia Viva in Mawa also includes a ertorial office, a local physical space dedicated to direct engagement and service for the population.
Strengthening dialogue and coordinating with residents.
So this is about our vision adopted by the Ministry of Cities through the National Secretariat for Piphes that's promoting resilience and sustainability in vulnerable territories by integrating housing, infrastructure, environmental recovery, and disastrous risk management.
So thank you.
Thank you very much, Alice.
I think it's important what you said right now about the periphes, how this is a difficult area of our cities in order to planning and housing and living there.
It's a lot of work that I know that Brazil has been doing in that area.
But it's something that happens in all our crown dries and I think it's a very good example as you share with us right now.
Then we are going to talk about Colombia.
Maria, if you can share with us all your work, please.
Well, hello to everyone.
Thank you for the invitation to UN habitat and thank you to all the panelists here, ambers Pam As we know, Cali is a city in Colombia that two years ago was the host for the biodiversity Cup.
In Cali, we are aware of the importance of biodiversity, climate change, and resilience.
That's why we have a biodiversity plan and decarbonization plan in the city.
As such, we have a major putting an emphasis on all these topics, and then we see a big need in terms of housing, and we really need to understand how we can create or close the gap between all the housing situations and the access to a affordable housing.
We understand that all these topics are not disconnected.
Housing is connected to climate change and resilience.
And so I want to share with you a project we are managing and creating from Cali that combines social inclusion and all the components of the social inclusion related also to climate change, every social aspect, the creation of public spaces together with communities and resettlement.
This is a project that's been developed within Cali.
I really want to share it with you because we can really work through all these challenges slowly but surely.
We really want to share an example that maybe you can recreate so that all the people present here, pay attention to all these nature based solutions we are developing.
Thank you very much.
Maria.
Thank you very much, Maria.
Now that you're speaking in Spanish, I'm going to try to stick to Spanish too.
Why not? I think what you are sharing and what I take away from these words is the need to create instruments that really show a blueprint on how to adapt in the face of climate change and so we can really go beyond any administration obstacles and this is one of the biggest challenges we have.
And now I'm going to stick to Spanish to continue now with Ives, who is the Director of the National Institute of the Spatial Planning in Cuba.
We are grateful you are here and we would like to hear about the work you're doing in your country.
Please go ahead, Ives.
Thank you very much, Martha, for this invitation.
It's an honor sharing this space with all of you.
Thanks to UN Habitat and the Survey an for allowing us to be here.
For a Cuban person to talk about resilience is, well, how can I say it? Cubans are resilient by definition.
I think we are the biggest expression of resilience that a country can show, that a people can show.
For more than 60 years of blockade that we know, especially in the last few months has been strengthened.
And these measures have really taken us to the edge in terms of, especially energy, and even under these conditions, we resist.
Not only that, we progress and we keep working.
This is only a result, first of all, of a political will that's strong and robust As a small insular country, we know we are constantly in need of adapting, especially with climate change and also seeing the increase in all these natural catastrophes that we are all experiencing.
From this, we created two state plans, the first known as the Terre Vida, which is life assignment, which is going to tackle climate change.
The second state plan approved in 2019 that wants to approve the new agenda in Cuba.
This plan granted us The champions on this new agenda implementation and we got honor me because of our job, because we really have created a lot of resilient development and we're really working hard to make sure all territories are part of this.
All these plans are connected to the new urban agenda and the strategic plan is based on risk assessment and climate change and we have clear steps on how to face climate change.
With more than 32,000 settlements identified as high risk by 2050 and 2,100, we are starting to calculate the displacements that might happen.
This is also accompanied by a number of instruments that go from the local to the national level and also research and risk assessments.
That are taking place at national level and go all the way down to small infrastructure in municipal level too.
This research on risk assessment are integrated in the planning instruments, which now cover 168 municipalities that have their own special planning documents.
And that are now based on the Act 145 for spatial planning and land management.
All these machinery made by policies and instruments articulated through the national urban policy and also the participation of different sectors are allowing us to work as a state, to have special centers for risk management in all the provinces and municipalities of the country and so that the early alert systems are early warning systems are prepared.
All these political and institutional structure are ready for this, even if we are affected by extreme phenomena every year.
And we can see that they keep increasing.
Even if economically we will be affected, we are really trying to reduce human loss.
So the biggest challenge we have in Cuba, we need this blockade to be removed and so that we can keep making progress and show that when there's willpower, everything is possible.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It is clear that it's an enormous work given the conditions and it seems to me that you have added value to this conversation.
This is vital, not only having an approach towards where we need to head to, but it's important to bear in mind the legislation and the different ingredients that are the political willingness because if we want to move forward, it's important to have this willingness.
It's important to understand the local context as well because the needs are found there, the key needs are found there.
With this, and I think we are already getting closer to the core of this discussion.
The General Director of Housing, infrastructure, and communities in Canada to share your work, please.
Good afternoon, panelists and thank you, UN Habitat for the invitation.
This is a very pertinent topic in Canada and for the government of Canada.
We have a very large country in Canada.
It's a country that has seven different climate zones.
In one of those provinces alone, we see five of the seven climate zones presented, and we're certainly starting to feel the effects of climate change in Canada.
Um, uh, through flooding, unprecedented flooding, forest fires, earthquakes.
We're seeing a thinning ice flow in certain parts of the country, parts of the country that are accessible through ice roads in the winter, we're seeing the ice road season diminishing.
And so we're looking, and we've been looking for some time now and working at a national level with the federal government, but also with our partners in provinces and territories.
Those are our regional governments, and then of course, communities and local governments and indigenous partners to see how, um, how we can collectively come together to take action to protect critical infrastructure and adapt our critical infrastructure and to adapt our housing and our homes to respond and make them resilient to climate change.
At the federal government level, we've really been focusing on a few different avenues.
Planning is one of them, just like many of my colleagues in other countries, providing national leadership and capacity and resources to enable robust plans and risk mitigation plans to respond to the crisis, but also using the federal funding power to spend and to invest in long term predictable and sustainable funds that can be deployed to support projects at different levels of government to respond to the climate change crisis and to adapt infrastructure and to mitigate risks.
Um, these risks are particularly acute in northern and indigenous communities, and we've been fortunate to bring traditional indigenous knowledge practices to those plans and to better situate those plans in local circumstances.
Like my colleagues in other countries, data is very important in the Canadian context as well.
One of the most important ways that our government has contributed has been to support access to reliable and accessible climate hazard and risk data.
Prior to this, we had very fragmented and outdated, um, data on hazard mapping.
It was difficult for municipalities and planners and housing developers to incorporate climate risk into their plans and their projects as a result.
And so we've done some national mapping.
We've brought forward climate science to inform those plans and projections, and also to have better early warning systems in place to support at all levels of government.
We are also increasingly shifting our efforts.
We have a national disaster response.
It's like a national emergency plan to compensate and to rebuild after national disasters.
But we're increasingly shifting our focus from responsive measures to preventative measures.
Um, and using federal regulatory levers to encourage things like changes to national building codes so that we're building infrastructure, we're building housing and critical assets with a lens to climate change so that they'll be more resilient on a go forward basis and be able to better withstand the impacts of natural disasters.
Thank you, Sherry.
I think now you put another ingredient in this talk about the data that we need to know exactly in what territory and in what area of our country is happening, what kind of disasters or climate change actions, and what is really happening in our lands.
With this in mind, I want to ask you some questions to be more specific in about one of the topics.
I want to have the first question for Alice.
How can cities better integrate biodiversity, housing, and climate adaptation in urban planning and decision making? So thank you, Martha, for the question.
Actually, I think there's three topics that are important to say about planning and climate change.
In Brazil, we also already have a lot of money to infrastructure, but not a exactly project with climate change aspects, the land of climate change, not exactly on those projects.
So we consider that to have more nature based solutions in our project to contribute to climate adaptation and environmental enhancement.
So that's a topic that we're working on in the peripheral areas where there are less green areas, less nature, and there is a a lack of green infrastructure on the informal settlements.
The other one I think to straightening the social participation.
In Brazil, we believe a lot that without the civil society and the social movements, we cannot address correctly the infrastructure.
So that's something that we are working and we believe a lot to the social participation.
The third one that my colleague from Canada said before the data oriented to decision.
Not only data, but data oriented to the policymakers, make good decisions where to invest, how to invest, which solution is better for that locality.
And especially to have the projections of the climate change also to incorporate on this infrastructure project.
I think those three topics are the ones that we are that are big challenges for us in Brazil, and we want to advance.
Thank you.
Thank you, Alice.
For the same idea of how we have this construction about knowledge, I want to know about Colombia.
What role can nature based solutions play in improving housing resilience and in reduction of urban climate risks.
Well, I would like to tell you about a concrete project that we are working on in Cali in Colombia.
It integrates these nature based solutions and construction or the relocalization of houses.
We have important gaps in this regard regarding the water regulation of the city, for the protection of the city, regarding any kind of floods and these gaps Include irregular settlements.
What are we doing? Well, we are relocalizing these settlements in front of the lacons leaving emerging.
This allows us to have important solutions because the families don't leave their territories, but they remain there.
What we do is to create more than 500 housing solutions to be able to accommodate these people that are around the river areas, allowing to recover these and allowing to create adaptation to climate change, allowing to work on the risk of the city by mitigating the risk of flooding and mitigating and favoring the families that have more vulnerabilities in this part of the city.
With this project, which is divided into different phases, there are three phases in total.
We are going to recover more than 110,000 square meters.
These will be recovered.
We will create different equipment for the cities and it is an area of the city that is one of the poorest ones.
So we are tackling all the components that matter for a city, which are to create housing, to create public spaces, equipment as well as solutions to mitigate climate change.
Besides, We have a cooperation with the HF, which allows us to create different solar panels on the roofs of the buildings that will allow us to have a reduction of greenhouse gases in a few years.
If we could have more sustainable buildings because in the end, these are houses that are important from the social point of view.
We have different important projects that count on all the important components and it's important for us to to work a little bit more, we could have greater environmental impacts.
It's important to manage our resources.
Well, we have a very important project and this project, we work on it with the community.
As my colleague from Brazil said, if we don't work in these solutions hand in hand with the community, by designing these solutions with them, things on the territory won't be done only thanks to the political willingness.
We can have the best plans, the best projects, we can have the best resources, but if the willingness of the people that live in the territory is not there, we wouldn't be able to make these projects come true.
So there are solutions.
Indeed, there are interesting cases that we can share, and the example of Kali is one of them.
We are working together, and we are working in order to tackle all the risks a positive impact on the city and on the people by providing them with a sustainable with a sustainable house.
Thank you very much.
I think that what you have just said makes us think about the diversity that exists in our territories as well, the broadens that exists as well.
For example, in the case of Canada, Brazil, Mexico, where we can find these countries countries that are territorial countries, the countries are so big that they are like continents.
I think that in this regard, the diversity poses a poses a challenge as well.
Let's continue with our conversation, Evie.
It's important to know about how these practices, this practice is consisting of building sustainable houses.
How can they contribute to the mitigation and the adaptation to climate change? Yes, thank you very much, Martha, for your question.
Well, Mitigation and adaptation are the dual approaches of the resilient construction processes, and so We need to try to mitigate the effects, the potential effects of climate change by reducing the greenhouse gases emissions.
How can we proceed? We can use the energy efficiency projects, for example, in Cua that's how we are doing it.
We revise them every time we have construction permits or authorizations from the land use land management plans.
How we can optimize the lights, for example, the natural ventilation in all the buildings.
We can make how can we make the most of these lights? How can we use low carbon materials? I just remembered and we discussed it a while ago, we were talking about different projects that we have been implementing in Cuba through the experiences of housing projects, different specific roofs because This is the identity of many of the areas, many of the rural areas in Cuba, that are very resilient as well to the consequences of these extreme adverse events.
This has been proved by the population.
We also highlighted the importance of the popular knowledge as well as the participation of the society, and it has been proven that the people, the individuals themselves that live in these places in Cuba, we call Barner we use this term to refer to this type of buildings.
These are specific groups and these are structures that at least in the regions, in the rural areas or urban territories, they make people have a shelter and they protect them from these adverse events.
So when it comes to the use of these materials in the center of the country, we are using different low carbon materials.
We have been awarded with different international awards, by the way, and The small private companies are producing these materials, the use of renewable forces, renewable sources of energy.
In Cuba in the last month, the energy matrix has changed, and I think we need to tend to the use of clean sources of energy.
We need to tend to the low carbon solutions and we have had the opportunity to have an international cooperation.
Sorry, I forgot to say it before, but we are truly thankful to our UN agencies, but not only, especially we are thankful to UN Abt that they have been by our side in all our activities and efforts moving forward, but also the development agencies, the cooperation agencies of the different countries that have always been there for us and they have been accompanying us in this way.
As I was telling you, when it comes to the low carbon mobility, we can also talk about an important principle, which is the sustainable mobility.
This has been added to the different policies.
And then what is missing is to be able to have the funds to implement different measures, little by little, of course, but we are moving forward indeed.
And then when it comes to the adaptation, it's important to build by adopting more concrete approach because When we cannot how to say, when we cannot fix something is like, Okay, we need to adapt.
We are forced to adapt.
It's important that these buildings because we cannot only talk about buildings, but we need to talk about the fact of them being more resilient and resistance to these events, these climate events and the change in temperatures at least in our country, I would say that there are different heat waves that are huge and in our cities, we need to prevent by using the bioclimatic design.
We have different technical regulations in Cuba.
It's like a series of laws that regulate the construction and let's say that they have a mandate and they tell us that we need to migrate towards this type of bioclimatic constructions, we need to bear in mind the use of materials, the color, the different heights.
We always tend to say that the buildings that we inherit from the 19th century, they were pretty well adapted to the climate, considering the different heats, ventilation, natural lighting, the covers as well by using local materials, et cetera.
Also, when it comes to the water management from the different plants, well, all these principles, From the National Institute of Territorial Management of Cuba, we have been integrating them.
We have integrated these principles, for example, the planning instruments so that they can become true tools for the decision making processes that is on the hands of the governments, not only the national governments, but also the local governments.
Adaptation of the structures is very important as well.
We need to reinforce the structures.
For example, in one of the zones, we have seismic risks.
So it is very important and also the draining systems, the early warning systems, I already talked about it.
Then the restoration and protection of the ecosystems, the mangroves in our state, our archipelago, mangroves are very important because they are the first barrier to actually face the different disasters and also different coastal infrastructures.
They are more expensive, but we include them in all our tools so that they can be implemented at the right times.
Thank you.
Thinking of energetic efficiency from planning building permits.
The passive design of construction is essential for sure, from the inception of this kind of planning.
How can federal or national governments provide incentives and support to local governments in order to work with these communities and with these perspectives about climate adaptation? Well, thank you very much.
As I mentioned before, Canada is a large country.
There is no one size fits all approach that's going to work in our country.
We have different regions, different climate zones, and so funding opportunities that we would be providing as a federal government really need to rely on flexible approaches that can be adapted to local and community circumstances.
And so we have funded a number of place based and nature based projects.
I'll give you a few examples, projects to see green roofs.
Um, restored wetlands, and expanded tree canopies.
But one of the most recent ones that I wanted to talk about here today is really in Canada's North and it's really a response to wanting to fill a gap, I guess, in housing infrastructure in Northern Canada, but also build housing in a way that it is resistant and adaptive to climate risks in the North.
Um, and so we're really proud to have recently launched as a Canadian government a partnership with the territorial government of Nunavut, as well as the Inuit government in that territory that will see over 750 new housing units built in the territory in the North.
This is a significant accomplishment, This is a part of Canada that's quite difficult to access.
It's typically you can fly there, but goods or materials are often having to be brought in by sea lift, which is only accessible during parts of the year due to the ice flow in that region.
Construction of housing infrastructure has been a challenge for many years and led to significant gaps.
As a result, we've seen Canadians in the North either under house or overcrowded as a result, 750 new homes in that territory is a significant progress going forward.
It's also significant because that community is above the tree line.
It's not like they can rely on typical traditional stick built or lumber homes.
These homes will be built largely relying on modern methods of construction, so factory built homes with that factory capacity being established in the north to channel that supply.
The other thing that's interesting is the partnership with the inuit government.
Who will operate a percentage of the homes that will be built and they'll operate those homes using a traditional model that will incentivize labor and employment opportunities for their citizens, but also serve as a rent to own model so that they can gradually move their citizens into a home ownership opportunity and a source of wealth creation for their citizens.
Um, and have equity in families that can be passed on through generations.
So it's got an important social interest as well.
The other thing that's quite interesting is, it's very expensive to heat in the North.
So the homes will be built using hyper insulation or techniques to make them very energy efficient.
And resilient, but also more affordable to heat and keep families warm during the long winter months.
So those are just a few examples of infrastructure projects in Canada that are being built with the lens to filling gaps, to responding and mitigating climate risks and really being adaptive to local and community circumstances.
Thank you, Cherry.
I don't know.
We need to finish this panel, but I want to try to make as a summary as I wrap up information because I think what we were talking here was so important, but I tried to catch ten ideas about what you were talking about and I will tell you in Spanish, sorry, but I think it's important to put this in the table.
Prime First of all, out of these ten topics we talked about, and that are important to bring forward in terms of climate adaptation and biodiversity and how construction can be resilient.
The solutions that were shared were nature based solutions.
But they really have to be adapted to each specific territory.
You also spoke about the importance of social engagement and how this should be aligned to the principles and values of each community.
You also talked about the importance of data and how they should be oriented to decision making and how these decisions can be taken by those public servers that are aligned to this vision of climate adaptation.
You also shared about relocalization of those irregular settlements found in all these different countries and the focus not only on housing, but in public space also that can allow this change to be more effective.
You also shared about collaborating with communities and observing the real needs from all of these particular places.
Also searching energetic efficiency, Since the construction point of view is so important and designs are needed to be adapted according to each territory.
You also shared about the search for more financing, how we can really make legislation to be more effective long term and how to really include social housing, and then also observing the lifecycle of a housing, and then hoping that it will last for a long time and never be abandoned.
I'm sorry to be talking in Spanish, but it's easier for me to speak in my mother tongue.
I really thank you for your attention and your participation.
Thank you very much.
I think.