ONE UN - Strengthening Urban Earthquake Preparedness ONE UN Solutions for Safer and More Resilient Cities (WUF13)

Welcome everyone.
Thank you very much for being here.
Honorable ministers, Executive Secretary, resident coordinators.
It's a pleasure to be here today with you.
We will be talking today about urban resilience, a topic that has been highlighted in many of the countries in many of the sessions that we have seen today these days in the World Urban Forum.
Urban resilience has many facets, but one of the most relevant and has the deepest impacts that we have seen is earthquake preparedness and earthquake prevention.
So with the presence of our speakers today of our panel, we will be discussing some of these topics with very relevant details with very relevant information on current events that have shaken our UNIC region and globally.
I would like to go to the opening remarks, and I would like to present the panel that we have here today with us.
On the side of UNIC we have Mr.
Dmitri Mar Yasin, who is our Deputy Executive Secretary.
We have with us our resident coordinator, United Nations in Turkey, Mr.
Babatunde Ahnsi, Mr.
Erfan Ali, Regional Director of UN Habitat.
We have Mr.
Loretta Heber, who is the Chief Risk Knowledge Management and capacity development of UN DNR.
We have the honor to have today with us as a keynote address Honorable Hassan Suber, who is the Deputy Minister of Environment, Organization of Climate Change in Turkeya and Mr.
Talan Beek Imanukulu who is the Deputy Minister of Construction, Architecture, housing and communal Services of the Kyrgyz Republic.
We'll have some other speakers afterwards.
We could not fit all of them in the beginning, but we are really excited to be here.
This is a UN event.
This is a UN one event that brings together national stakeholders, local stakeholders on this very relevant topic.
Without further ado, Please let me give the floor to Mr.
Dmitri Marin, Executive Secretary of UNIC for the opening remarks.
Very much, Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, mayors and ladies and gentlemen, warm welcome from the side of UNIC to this one UN event on strengthening urban resilience and earthquake preparedness.
It's a pleasure to open this discussion together with our colleagues from UN Habitat and UNDRR who are coganizing the event with us and with the participation of national and local governments, development partners, and technical experts.
Now, the core message of this event is that risk never comes alone.
Risks are multifaceted and interconnected, and most cities in the world are not ready to face their interconnected nature and to face the multitude of risks, be it man made disasters, be it natural disasters, be it the consequences of conflict, and of course, the quick onset events related to climate change, which one cannot even properly classify because they often combine natural and technological disasters in one.
But perhaps no risk is more devastating as a threat to urban areas worldwide than earthquakes.
Earthquakes expose structural vulnerabilities of cities.
They show where housing, infrastructure, and land management systems breakdown.
They test governance frameworks, and of course, they cause enormous human social and economic losses.
These losses are very hard to recover and of course, the general formula still holds here.
It is much better to invest in resilience than to invest in disaster relief.
Recent disasters across the UniS region and beyond have shown this very vividly.
Unfortunately, resilience is something that needs to be invested before the crisis and when the crisis hit, it's already too late.
The devastating earthquake in Turkey a few years ago offers many important and timely lessons.
The reconstruction effort led by the government of Turkey following the devastating earthquake has demonstrated extraordinary institutional mobilization, speed of response, and also long term vision for recovery and rebuilding.
We should all learn from that.
The scale of reconstruction and recovery efforts, particularly in affected provinces such as Hatai show how resilience can become operational through coordinated public action and political leadership.
UNIC team was on the ground in Hatai and had the opportunity to engage directly with the national and local counterparts there, together with the UN country team under the leadership of the UN resident coordinator who is also here with us today and see what it means to put urban resilience, earthquake preparedness and recovery solutions together.
What are the lessons that we are learning from this? First, the critical role of strong and updated building standards, building codes.
This cannot be emphasized enough.
Investing in design is what saves lives, potentially thousands of lives.
Doing it with responsibility, preventing corruption, and making sure there are no compromises on safety is what every government and every city needs to have in mind.
Standards, they matter because they help save lives.
Secondly, this goes beyond standards.
A system needs to be in place.
Urban systems, both when it comes to prevention and when it comes to rebuilding, need to operate and that means urban planning systems and frameworks need to be in place that are inclusive, sustainable, and climate resilient.
But it's not enough to have a planning framework because if communities down to a very small municipal unit, are not actually engaged in defining these frameworks and implementing them, the frameworks will remain perfect plans on paper and we do not want that.
As somebody mentioned at one of the roundtables yesterday, we should ensure that no community is left behind in urban planning, in planning for resilient future, including when it comes to how housing is being designed.
Third, financing.
We need financing that addresses vulnerabilities that helps build resilience, and here, insurance mechanisms will play a critical role in accelerating recovery and reducing long term vulnerability.
Turkey's experience with disaster insurance mechanisms demonstrates how financial preparedness should be part of overall preparedness.
But financing means private sector needs to feel comfortable to invest.
That means we need to de risk, and the risking requires data and predictability.
So to have investments at scale, and this is our objective, investments in climate smart, resilient buildings, infrastructure, systems, and capacities, we need data, data that will underpin good planning and good investments.
These are the main lessons learned.
We are very pleased to have with us today the Deputy Minister from Turkey, the Deputy Minister from Kyrgyzstan, and very importantly representatives of several cities and other entities, other players in this field from several countries of our region to learn, to listen to each other, to exchange.
And going forward with UN Habitat and UNDR, we hope to join forces to support countries in this very important journey to build preparedness systems, to build planning capacities, and to ensure knowledge transfer so that scalable solutions can contribute to much more resilient urban systems in the face of earthquakes, which unfortunately will repeat themselves.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Deputy Executive Secretary for those inspiring boards, and I would like to the floor to Mr.
Babatunde Ahnsy who is the resident coordinator of the United Nations in Turkey.
Thank you very much, Excellency honorable ministers present and esteemed mayor's presence, dear delegates.
It is both an honor and a responsibility for me to make some remarks at this important discussion on strengthening urban earthquake preparedness, an issue that has really moved from theoretical this to lived reality for Türkiye.
The earthquakes of February 2023, widely described as the disaster of the century, were not only a humanitarian catastrophe.
They constituted a profound system wide stress in terms of the testing of our development models, our governance systems, and our urban planning paradigms.
As highlighted in our own national and UN analysis, these events revealed not only the scale of physical vulnerability embedded in our cities, but also the systemic interdependencies that shape risk in the 21st century.
Yet within this profound tragedy lies a critical opportunity, an opportunity to transform recovery into a forward looking agenda for resilience, sustainability, and inclusion.
Today, the central question is, It's not whether we should rebuild, but how we rebuild and for whom.
And in Turkey, recovery efforts have been framed not as a return to the pre disaster conditions, but as a strategic inflection point to transition towards more resilient urban systems, low carbon and climate compatible infrastructure, and inclusive socioeconomic development pathways.
Cities difference, as we know, sits at the intersection of risk vulnerability and opportunity.
They concentrate populations, assets, and economic activity, but also inequality and exposure to shocks.
This is why urban resilience must be positioned at the heart of both national recovery strategies and global processes such as CP 31.
Indeed, the KS experience demonstrates that urban resilience is not a cost.
It is one of the most strategic and cost effective investments we can make for sustainable development.
Since I've been in Toky for 2.5 years, one of the most important lessons that I've learned from Tk's response has been the necessity of moving beyond fragmented approaches towards integrated whole of system solutions.
The United Nations Cory team has worked in close partnership with the government of Turkey to really operationalize the model built on three mutually reinforcing pillars.
One is the whole of government approach, so that you have vertical and horizontal coordination across institutions, regional authorities, municipalities, but also a whole of society approach that engages civil society, academia, the private sector, and in particular, the affected communities themselves as active co creators of recovery, and of course, the whole of UN approach.
On our part as the United Nations country team, we try to operationalize this IND recovery efforts by creating innovative coordination mechanisms in the impacted provinces.
I'm happy that the mayor of Gazian Tepe is here where we based our area based coordination system in the aftermath of the earthquakes.
This has enabled decision making to be informed by realities on the ground.
And for interventions to be tailored to the specific needs of the affected provinces such as Satab, Malaga, and so on.
So bringing together UN agencies, national institutions, local authorities, NGOs, and private sector actors in a single coordination architecture really helped to reduce fragmentation in our own efforts as well as the UN and also strengthened coherence and I would say, impact in the partnership that we had with the authorities.
Another critical lessons that we learned from Turka's experience is that resilience must be deliberately financed.
It does not emerge on its own organically.
The scale of the 2023 earthquakes required unprecedented mobilization of resources, combining over $100 billion in public expenditure by the government of Turkey, approximately 7 billion euros pledged through international partners at the Brussels Door Conference, substantial financing from international financial institutions, including the World Bank, the EBRD, and others, and of course, the private sector, significant contributions from the private sector.
So this multi layered financing architecture illustrates a fundamental principle that is no single actor, public or private, national or international can carry the burden of recovery alone.
Instead, what is required is blended, coordinated, and a risk informed financing ecosystem.
At the same time, I think the Deputy Executive Secretary mentioned that everything that we do in recovery has to be guided by data and evidence, including post disaster needs assessments such as the one the UN was involved with the World Bank immediately after the earthquake.
Equally important is the recognition that resilience must be people centered and equity driven.
We know, as with most things, human, that disasters do not affect all populations equally.
I care vulnerable groups, including women, children, refugees, persons with disabilities, and informal workers really faced disproportionate impacts, and we have evidence for this.
This is why the principle of leaving no one behind has been central to recovery efforts, guiding the design of social protection systems, targeted livelihood and SME support programs, and also inclusive participatory planning processes.
So as we look ahead, dear colleagues and friends, I think it is essential to recognize that cities are not only the sites of risk, but they are also engines of recovery.
They are engines of innovation, they are engines of transformation.
Anyone in this room that has been to the earthquake impacted towns and cities in Tokyo will see in real time concretely what this means, how cities can really be transformed out of a disaster.
And cities, of course, when they are resilient, through proper support can then drive economic recovery, job creation, digital transitions, attract sustainable investment, and also strengthen social cohesion and stability.
So we see in Tokyo a number of cities, including Gazian.
Madam Mayor, thank you for being a Hata and others that have really become global demonstration cases of how post disaster recovery can be aligned with climate action and sustainable development goals.
So let me conclude by recalling the words of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who has reminded us that resilience is not a choice.
It is an imperative.
But this requires leadership and collective leadership, for that matter, shared responsibility and sustained partnership.
I think if we work in this way, we can together transform cities affected by disasters into global models of resilience for generations to come.
I thank you.
Thank you very much, resident coordinator of the United Nations to Key, and I would like to give the floor now to Mr.
E Fani who is Regional Director of UN Habitat.
Thank you so much, Excellencies, Deputy Ministers, Madam Mayor, colleagues from ECE, and DRR, our coordinator.
Thank you so much for this opportunity to share our insights and our partnership now to strengthen urban resilience.
Immediately, when we speak about earthquake, for me, it brings back to me some important personal memories when I landed in Aleppo after 13 years being absent from my country, Syria.
And I saw families two, three weeks after the earthquake in 2023, and I saw hundreds of families, despite it was three or four weeks, hundreds of families still searching for their beloved ones with very primitive, very primitive tools and equipments with the hope that they will still find their families, their beloved ones still alive.
You know, the earthquake there added, um added a lot to the tragedy of the people of the population of the city after ten years of war, for sure.
And it reminded me that resilience building resilience, which you said that it's a primitive.
It's indeed the primitive.
It's a primitive because it's about the life of people.
It's it's about protecting the lives of people, protecting their properties, protecting their housing, protecting their future.
Protecting this from the shocks from the disasters, from the risks of the shocks and disasters, the risks which are converging mainly in cities.
Risks are mainly converging in cities, different kinds of risks, floods, heat waves, different types of incidents and risks, yet earthquakes, for sure, remain among the most devastating risks facing the urban areas and represent a very important threat to the lives of people.
This is why urban resilience is no longer a technical add on when we speak about urban development.
It is a core condition for sustainability or sustainable cities.
This message for us is especially relevant for the region, for the Eastern Europe, Central Asia because Mr.
Babatunda the resilient coordinator, he highlighted on the impact of the earthquake that we faced that was the largest since decades hit the region hit in Turkey and in Syria and you spoke about the numbers, about the impact, hundreds of thousands of lives tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of lost housing and properties because of the earthquake.
So, uh, For us, as you inhabit, as the technical organization dealing and supporting human settlements and cities, our strategic plan places housing, land, and basic services in the center of our work.
Strategy identifies preparedness, response, recovery, and reconstruction as a key impact area to achieve our mandate on the ground in the human settlements, for sure, alongside the climate action and poverty and addressing poverty and prosperity in the cities.
It's also our strategy.
We emphasize the means that we leverage in our implementation, when including the integrated the special planning, the integrated urban territorial planning, the parts battery governance, the knowledge, data as both the deputy executive secretary and the RC, we we needed to help us to build the evidence, to prepare for the preparedness, to help the decision makers in their uh, um, in their work in their strategies, in their projects.
These are precisely, for us, the foundation of building resilience, building resilience at the local level, which we aim to contribute in the region and globally.
So this is why also today discussion in this session is very timely, is very important because we are trying to bring together the different concerned institutions, the expertise, and the political commitment here within the World Urban Forum to move from just building risk awareness to to help to design actions, to build the framework to implement actions and projects that could help to build the resilience on the ground.
It's this discussion offers us a very important opportunity to link the earthquake preparedness to a broader resilience agenda that includes resilient housing, risk informed special planning, stronger land management, and better governance system.
So the proposed program that we are bringing together with ECE, DRR, and UN Habitat to help to prepare for resilience to earthquake is very promising.
We try to if we succeed to develop this initiative, well, it must help cities and countries to turn lessons from recent crisis, recent disasters into common implementable tools, shared standards, and more bankable resilience investments.
Yesterday, we were together with our colleagues from the Ir Bank, and we spoke about this type of partnerships to help to provide the tools, to provide the financing to the cities to be ready to encounter to encounter risks and in particular, risks like the earthquakes.
The ant seismic risks.
This is also important discussion in the lead to Cop 31, the recent discussion with the Ministry of Urbanization and Environment in Hatai and the Hatatai Declaration two or three weeks ago reaffirmed a simple truth that resilience is about people.
It means acting now to protect lives, safeguard lives, secure homes, and preserve the social fabric for communities.
It means rebuilding better with stronger standard, safer neighborhoods, and more inclusive and sustainable cities.
On our side, we stand ready to work with all the partners to materialize, to build this framework and this partnership to help the member states to build resilience against earthquake shocks and disasters.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
And I would like to now give the floor to miss Loretta Hib Girardet, who is the Chief Risk knowledge monitoring and capacity Development of UN DRR.
Thank you so much, Excellency, distinguished colleagues, partners.
It really is a pleasure to be here today with you on behalf of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Many years ago in 2010, I was part of the immediate emergency response following the Haiti earthquake.
I remember standing in Port Au Pran surrounded by collapsed buildings, destroyed hospitals, and entire communities buried under rubble.
And what struck me most at that time was not only the scale of the destruction, but the realization that so much of that tragedy was preventable.
The earthquake itself was a natural hazard, but the disaster resulted from accumulated vulnerability, weak infrastructure, unplanned urban growth, poverty, insufficient building standards, and underinvestment in resilience.
This was an earthquake that took place in a country with very high levels of fragility and of course, it was the poorest communities that suffered the most and took many years to recover from this disaster.
This is a lesson that remains deeply relevant today.
As we confront the accelerating impacts of climate change, we believe very strongly at UN DRR that we must also ensure that geophysical hazards such as earthquakes, but not only earthquakes, volcanoes as well, are not forgotten.
Climate related disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity, but seismic risk continues to pose catastrophic threats to cities and to national economies, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions.
So we can't afford to create a false hierarchy of risks.
A truly resilient society must be prepared for both climate, geophysical hazards, but also environmental and technological hazards as well.
Earthquakes still account for more than a quarter of global economic disaster losses worldwide, with average annual losses estimated at $26 billion.
But we know that when a major seismic event strikes an urban center, the consequences can be devastating.
For example, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan alone caused an estimated $239 billion in losses.
This demonstrates how such disasters really have cascading long term economic and systemic impacts that go far beyond the immediate zone of destruction.
So from a DRR perspective, I'd like to maybe just raise three points.
First, we shouldn't just see earthquakes and other types of disasters as humanitarian crises, although they are these types of crises.
They're actually major development and economic shocks.
These recent disasters in Turkey, and Syria, Morocco, Nepal, Haiti, and elsewhere, have shown that seismic disasters can erase decades of development progress in a matter of minutes.
They destroy homes, as we know, schools, hospitals, transport systems, but they disrupt economies, they increase debt burdens, they weaken public finances, and they expose deep inequalities in our societies.
From the perspective of UN DRR, disasters are not natural.
We don't use the term natural disaster because we believe that hazards may be natural and unavoidable.
But disaster risk can and must be reduced through the decisions that we make before crises occur.
So therefore, resilience for us is something that must be built not even in the stage of preparedness, but long before that.
It really is about how we develop our economies and how we develop our systems and how we ensure that these are risk informed development decisions.
And for this data is obviously critical.
Disaster risk must be integrated into urban planning, housing policies, infrastructure, investment, land management, and governance systems.
We know what works when it comes to preventing the large scale effects of disasters including earthquakes and that includes risk sensitive land use planning, enforced seismic building standards, retrofitting, critical infrastructure, early warning systems.
There are advances that are being made when it comes to earthquakes, preparedness planning, and of course, building codes must not only be developed, but they must be enforced.
This, of course, was a big lesson from Haiti as well.
Every unsafe school, hospital, or housing development built today risks becoming tomorrow's disaster.
Our latest analysis shows that the true global cost of disasters now exceeds 2.3 trillion annually when we also look at indirect and cascading impacts.
Resilience is not a luxury, it's an economic necessity.
The real choice now is not between resilience and development, it's whether we invest now or we pay later.
A third point to be made is that resilience must be built at the local level.
This is where we will really see the greatest impact.
But for us to succeed, we need partnerships at every level.
Cities and local governments are indeed on the front line of resilience building, but they cannot do this alone.
We know that they are lacking often financing.
Technical capacity in some cases, and also institutional support.
We really see this collaboration between governments at the national level, at the city level, development banks, but also engineers, planners, communities is so essential.
The role of the private sector also needs to be strengthened.
There needs to be incentives for the private sector to engage in disaster prevention preparedness, but also recovery.
Today's dialogue is an opportunity not only to reflect on the lessons from the recent disasters, including the earthquakes, but to move from awareness to really concrete resilience actions and investment.
Resilience is not a cost to development, resilience is what protects development.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Now it's an honor to have this keynote address by Honorable Deputy Minister of Environment Organization and Climate Change of Turka, Mr.
Hasan Sub with all the knowledge that Turka has developed.
The floor is yours.
Tas.
Today, we have to come together to discuss common areas of cooperation for building safer and more resilient cities under the team of Urban resilience and earthquake preparedness.
Due to its geographical location, Turkey is a country exposed to many different disaster risks, particularly earthquakes.
Therefore, at the core of our urbanization policies lies not only growth and development, but also safer, also safety, resilience, risk reduction, and disaster preparedness.
For us, resilient city is not merely a city composed of strong buildings.
A resilient city is one that can withstand crisis through its infrastructure, transportation systems, green spaces, social facilities, economic vitality, and social solidarity.
Distinguished participants.
Our fundamental principle in combating earthquake risk is not to intervene after disasters occur, but to reduce the risk before the disasters even happen.
With this understanding, the renewal of the building stock, safe ground selection, proper planning, building inspection, infrastructure resilience, and emergency response capacity must all be addressed together.
The law on the transformation of areas under disaster risk enacted in 2012 marked a significant turning point in Turkey's urban transformation policies.
However, we do not view urban transformation merely as a renewal of buildings.
Transformation is a comprehensive urban planning process that enhances quality of life at the neighborhood level, strengthens social facilities, improves transportation connections, expanding green spaces, and creating safe living environments resilient to disasters.
The earthquakes of February six, 2023, painfully demonstrated how vital it is for our cities to be prepared for disasters.
Following this major catastrophe, Turkey launched a comprehensive recovery process guided by the principle of building to do better.
Today, 455,357 independent housing units have been constructed in the earthquake zone, while the support has also been provided for 124,000 independent units for our earthquake affected citizens.
In this process, we are not only constructing houses, but also creating holistic living places with resilient infrastructure, social facilities, green areas, energy efficiency approaches, and environmental sustainability.
Finance, financing instruments are also critically important in strengthening urban resilience.
In the scope, social housing initiative carried out with the target of 500,000 social housing units across 81 provinces and 100,000 housing units in Istanbul initiative supports access to safe and affordable housing.
Furthermore, under the newly announced support package for Istanbul Srban Transformation, our citizens are offered financing opportunities up to 3 million Turkish euros with repayment plans extending up to 15 years at an interest rate of 0.69%.
These efforts demonstrate that public resources, local governments, private sector capacity, and international financing instruments must all be utilized towards the same objective.
In this regard, the support provided by I Bank affiliated to our ministry for sustainable infrastructure investments by local administration is also an important instrument.
Distinguished participants as Turkey, we embrace a resilience approach that learns from earthquake experience and which is grounded in scientific data and utilizes technology involves society in the process and takes climate risks into account.
As I conclude my remarks, I would like to once again emphasize Turkey's determination to build safer and more resilient cities.
Our country stands ready to share its knowledge and experience in this field with international partners and to strengthen cooperation for a common feature.
I respectfully greet each and every one of you and thank you.
Thank you very much.
T.
I now know that some of our team speakers need to leave because they have engagements.
So those of you that are bound to the airport or other sessions, please you are invited to leave.
But we will continue the session.
Thank you very much.
And it has been a pleasure to have you here.
I will also ask a Yes.
I will also ask so that we can also have the intervention from other colleagues that will join us today, miss beta DGutou who is the chief architect of the City of Quisina.
Miss Fatma Sahim who is the Mayor of Genv Turkey to join us, please.
Mr.
Alessandro Atika who is the Executive Director of the Department of Territorial Planning of Potenza.
And Mr.
Ilijah Atharv, if you want to join us also in the panel, you are very welcome.
Thank you very much.
And apologies because since some of the speakers had to leave, we had to do this.
I would like to give now the floor to Mr.
Talanbk Imanuk Uulu, who is the Deputy Minister of Construction, Architecture, housing, and Communal Services of the Kyguz Republic.
Please, the floor is yours.
Dear colleagues, good morning.
I'd like to give to your attention a report which is dedicated to seismic issues regarding regulation for safety of a of our buildings.
We have the system of mountains Kshan with high seismic activity and this defines special requirements toward design and building of our objects in order to prevent any earthquakes, to be prepared for them.
Seismic activity in our republic is characterized by the fact that the earthquakes are are graded nine and they are highly risky and this requires seismic activity to be provided, to be previsaged when building any units.
We began implementing the intergovernmental national standards for buildings according to international requirements, not that many years ago.
In the country, we have formed a normative base which regulates design, use and protection of buildings which are built the norms and requirements foresee the requirements for safety of buildings of units.
The requirements also provide for sustainability and against any earthquakes, building norms are foreseen in our regulations, also regarding design of buildings.
Designing buildings if any units requires norms which are modern, also sanitary regulations are foreseen by our law.
Regarding norms and regulations.
We do calculate seismic activity and foresee this data in our plans.
When building units, we do calculate data on the basis of scientific data and best practices from all the world.
The norms are 98 and this requires preparedness for earthquake and safety preparedness of our buildings.
The norms are needed in order to develop the maps of peaks, of a seismic activity.
We use methods of calculation, of stability of buildings in case of earthquakes from many cities and we also calculate peaks for regarding peaks for soils in case of earthquakes.
We also apply R code in our work, renewed norms, and revised regulations at the state level, and we have also inspectors who do revise this data.
When we do city planning as well, we are able to understand which are risks for the territories and provide for regulations as envisaged.
We use a detailed analysis which takes into account specificities of the building sites.
We do analyze soils for building as well.
We define the necessary norms for safety buildings, seismology is very important for us.
We have a special institution working on it, and a special map was developed for cities which is used when providing for plans for building of new units in our countries.
All the projects are being examined by our state experts as well who analyze if the norms applied in the plans do coincide with the ones provided by the state in their norms and regulations.
Recently, in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan, we work on the legal framework.
We introduce computer medallion using best practices from other countries as well.
In the regions, we analyzed the peaks of seismic activity so that we can provide for safety for newly built units in these areas, we regulate all these plans and building plans.
We also introduce modern technologies and these are very important objectives for us in the seismic activity areas.
We directly involve our citizens in this work.
Thank you for your attention.
Thank you very much, Honorable Deputy Minister.
We would like to now before we move to the second part, show some of the content of the work that we have been jointly developing within the United Nations as a way to respond to these challenges.
If the presentation could be please placed.
We wanted also to reflect on some of the challenges that have been.
There was a presentation, this one.
Sorry for the glitch.
Yes, exactly.
After this one, Perfect.
Thank you very much.
Very briefly as a way to frame the discussion that we have been hearing, some of the specific aspects of why are we experiencing these type of aspects of challenges.
We are talking about urban expansion that happens at a very quick pace.
We are talking about the change in exposure because of the concentration of people, because of the economic assets that our cities have.
And we are talking also about the aspects of infrastructure and dependencies of the different sectors that are in our city.
We have also experiencing demographic shifts within our region related to the population related to tourism pressure.
So all these aspects together are the ones that ask us to think about the urban system and the way that we respond to this urban resilience in an integrated manner.
Um, when we started this analysis that was a result of a request from our member states, we were looking at how we can review the national systems and practices.
Some of them has been presented today.
Lessons from the past, many of them has been highlighted, and also to have a comparison of the global guidance or with global guidances that have been developed.
Here we can see in two maps, two of these analyses that have been conducted and we see the relevance of this topic for our region.
We see that many of the countries that are represented here today of the cities are in areas with high hazards and that can really be exposed and are really exposed to these type of risks of earthquake and therefore preparedness is essential.
Some images that showcase how this resilience has been affected but not invested in is how urban development has happened in many of the cities, in many of the countries that we are working with with urban development decisions that are sometimes not made following this type of reasoning and that result into losses into damages, into disruption of services and cascading into other secondary impacts.
So what we What we saw and what has been discussed now is some of the governance challenges that appear that relate to fragmented institutional coordination, limited of the translation of the risk assessment into the planning process into the plans in the cities on the national scale.
This uneven preparedness in resilient capacities.
There is not sufficient amount of preparedness at the different levels.
As one of the topics that has been systematically raised is on the finances systems that are that are only recovery oriented and that are not flexible enough to pay for recovery.
So I will just skip to the last one where we came with a number of recommendations, actions, very concrete actions that can be taken and some of them have already emerged.
And we would like to take this opportunity now with our panels here to also reflect on some of the solutions that are presented here and also how municipal preparedness can be developed, how regional data that has been also mentioned systematically can be developed and can be interoperable between the different administrations, how preparedness and reconstruction governance tools can be put in place and also aspects of safety in buildings of municipal finance, peer learning, which is something that we have also considered one of the cornerstones of the work that the UN could provide, as well as pilot initiatives following this learning.
Please, with this sort of initial reflections from our side, I would like to give the floor now to miss Fatma Sahin, who is the honorable Mayor of Gasian Turkey.
Thank you.
Distinguished participants.
Yes.
Since I'm speaking in Turkish, if you would like, you could take headsets from the backside of the room.
No, no, no, Channel one.
Channel one, English.
Thank you very much for the invitation, for giving us the floor and thank you for the participation.
It's important that you listen to us because we all learn from each other.
From local to global, from global to local, micro to macro, macro to micro.
I think that kind of interaction is necessary for the entire world.
Two weeks ago, We had a superstorm and we had a super earthquake two years ago.
And 13 years ago, we had the greatest migration.
So we've been living with 500,000 refugees for a decade.
And as our resident coordinator was saying, these are all issues of humanity.
Therefore, resilience is now a must.
And therefore, Yes, we have to learn.
For earthquakes, for example, Japan is the best and I'm an engineer, by the way, by education, and as an engineer, I find working with them very effective for the technology, for the early warning.
And if we were to be able to do what they do, then we would protect everyone.
But that's our responsibility.
We need to protect the people.
As Turkey, we do a lot of investment, and with that, we've been able to create a massive success story.
And our president, Egypt Ardan spent half his budget to the earthquake region.
But if you don't have the budget, then what's you going to do? If this had happened in Africa, what was going to happen? Millions more will die.
Is that it? So therefore, mathematically speaking, we have to understand the problem and see that the $1 we saved today gives us $1,000 in the future in terms of prevention.
As Gaziane, as a metropolitan city, why were we successful? Because I had an earthquake master plan.
I had collected the data.
I had that opportunity as a mayor.
Yes, we, of course, still have a lot of challenges, but how are we different? I'll share that.
Our model is that just like it has been said academically, we create environments to create protocols.
The academia, private sector, us, we bring that all together.
And if you don't look at this as a local economy, and if you don't take that theory to practice in an urban environment, then you'll never be resilient, and then you will experience this picture in another century as well.
We have, we believe, four main factors, and you have to be successful in all of them, coordination, and then data.
Data is utterly important, and you have to make those data speak You have to also have the data collaborate through software that you design.
Maybe now we're going to be using the OECD platform, and that's how we became quicker because we had our previous master plan and therefore, yes, we got a lot of support globally speaking, and then post, we were able to create a success story and we are now able to share that.
Earthquakes are a major impact on everything.
And we had our industry which employed 300,000 people in our city, and we had to make that a smart industry.
And how do I do that? I have to not kill the fish, not kill the trees, not pollute the environment so that we can be sustainable, not just as the environment, but the industry itself and then not create more problems.
The smart industry requires the green industry and that requires high technology.
You have to disseminate that.
You need to include young people into that.
And more importantly, you have to convince everyone in the city of this necessity.
Of course, we get a lot of support from our ministries in the country, but you can't just wait for their leadership and their intervention.
You have to be ready to intervene yourself.
And therefore, you need your own infrastructures and capacity, and therefore, planning is vital.
You do it properly, but then you have to also implement properly.
You have to sit down with all of the parties of the urban environment and discuss how you will implement Yes, the government has a larger framework they work on and they guide, but you have to convince the local environment.
Teach them what they need to do.
Convince them.
And one important issue here is that you need to activate civil society.
Civil initiatives need to relay your message.
With that, you make the city resilient and safe.
After that, you may make it also smart and green, and then you can integrate all of that.
Yes, this is all very challenging, but it's also quite doable.
As managers, as leaders, we have to identify our priorities properly.
When we want smart cities, we need to be smart ourselves.
We need to sit down and discuss and talk Significantly in detail, with sincerity, and we have to sit down with not just local partners and parties, but national and international parties because this is one planet we have all together, which we need to protect and Antarctica needs protection.
If the ice melts there, we're all going to be impacted.
So this is not a choice we have.
It is a must, and we have to protect our waters for the humanity at large.
And this is a system, an ecosystem that begins with maybe the soil, then the water, then the air, then we get sick, then migration happens, then war happens, violence happens, and these cost humanity.
And people lose their fundamental right to live, to be able to prevent that We need safe urban environments.
How do we do that? That's the issue.
We have a lot of opportunities.
We have to create our own governance models that have local economies coordination, that works for our common safety.
So yes, at the point we are in, for us, we are industry city on one hand, we have tourism on the other hand, but we also have to bring in international finance to be able to move forward.
That's what we need because we need resources to be able to integrate all these different layers of an urban environment need.
For example, at the moment, we are OECD championship city.
We are EBRD green city.
We are also awarded by Europe.
And these are all a result of the efforts that we put in in these regards that I talked about.
And now we have our mandates to be able to develop further after the earthquake, and now we have a department for that in our municipality.
I've spent one third of my budget to that.
And I have to be ready for the future risks.
For example, if I hadn't had prepared the water infrastructure, I wouldn't have been able to give water after the earthquake.
And ICA had helped me in that regard.
So I have to continue these steps, and I have to continue coordinating, training, and the theory and practice have to coordinate.
Still, unfortunately, globally, we see a gap between there and we have to close that gap.
We continuously end up discussing these challenges, but now we have to turn to our solutions.
Smart cities, smart utilization are things we have to focus on, which we are doing.
And everything we had done prepared us for that earthquake.
And because of that, Six months later, we were able to get back to ourselves.
And now we are taking all of that further.
We are now focusing more on data, on digital development so that we take data to our decision making mechanisms.
Otherwise, it's not going to be good for anything.
If we want to protect our children, We have to sit down with a smart mind, prioritize, focus.
As I said, the master plans like earthquake, climate are things that are musts in cities, and I did that, and that's why I was able to prevail.
Global warming is now an issue significantly for us, and now we have made a master plan for climate as well, showing us our weaknesses, and now we're going to start creating solutions for that.
This is February 6th, right after the earthquake, and this was not a bad dream.
This was reality for us, but now we have been able to overcome that.
See how much work is put in.
Imagine an environment where you don't have toilets, where you don't have water, where you don't have education.
But took us 45 days to get back to normal daily life and This was all a result of our planning.
I'd like to specifically underline this issue.
People want to forget, but we can't let them.
Cob experienced an earthquake in 1994.
We went there and we saw their museum and they showed the results they experienced, the differences between the impact they saw.
And we did the same thing so that people remember.
So these are a part of our modeling now.
This is now our new district in the province.
And of course, this is done through the help of international support.
This is not something a local administration can do by itself.
World Bank, EBRD, UN, Europe, we really did support us.
And with that, we have been able to proceed significantly, and we are thankful on behalf of our city and and humanity.
And next time, hopefully, this impact will even be less.
Thank you very much.
What the local government can do when it's properly supported.
I would like to give the floor now to Ilana Dgtaro who is the chief architect of the City of Quisina Good afternoon to everybody.
First of all, I would like to thank you for this invitation, for the possibility to talk on very important topics regarding administration of our cities.
In my report, I will talk on Kisana on the new general master plan for urban development in parallel, we are working on several urban development plans regarding mobility regeneration of the center of center.
Modernization of the central part of the city and we have already done review and studies for all the areas of urban planning and what is important.
The studies have been done on ecological issues on the effects of sustainability.
We begin our work with planning with issue of permission for building on how infrastructures are being developed of how our citizens are being involved into all this work.
Regarding construction, we use the same mechanism as in other countries.
So the project is being verified, analyzed, and executed according to the norms which fortunately are still in place from the times of the Soviet Union, the requirements are very severe, very strict as our country.
Also is in the area of earthquakes of hazards, and we saw the map of the precedent speaker and we saw the map of Moldova as well.
We have the central area which is prone to earthquakes in Moldova and Kysinev.
We have earthquakes up to eight degrees of magnitude.
And of course underground waters can influence the magnitude and the earthquakes could be even more severe and other factors also climatic ones could be the ones that could influence it.
So when projecting designing, we had a lot of earthquakes in 90s.
The latest ones are So there were not big destructions because our buildings have been planned and built according to the norms of seismic stability.
We are still working using the culture, the culture of building, the culture of following the noms professional safety, the culture of every engineer who is designing.
They know that noms should not be violated.
Noms are based on blood, we say.
And so these gnomes cannot be calculated with the blood of people who could die during this catastrophe.
The studies that were done when preparing the master plan for urban development, we see that we have geological areas in our country, our city and they are damp, there are wet areas.
Urban development provides for substitution pipes which are rolled, which should be substituted and so the level of groundwaters arrived to 2.5 meters.
In 60s, there were 12 15 meters depth and this also influences all the system like engineering systems, plants, systems of early reaction, And when we talk on the system of early alarm, early preparedness, it is still on its way.
We have not developed it completely yet, but we have already foreseen the norms to be included into the regulations for the norms of behavior of works in these areas which are hazard, so the instrument of sustainability could be used when they are included in the norms in the plans of urban planning.
We do this in our master plan.
We do fix all these data in our master plans.
Today, all these maps have geo positions, they can be accessed publicly on Internet and they can be used for territories where soils are very vulnerable, where high hazards are present, geotechnical morphological studies should be done before any building is a planned to be built in that area programs of assessment of the areas where buildings should stay.
I can say that buildings are rolled and so structures are very vulnerable.
And also the owners of these buildings have done renovation without any permissions, and the buildings are very vulnerable people.
Uh, did what they wanted in their flats and no norms were followed.
So today, we need to study all these buildings.
We need to analyze the state in which these buildings are today.
So a lot of work is still being done in many buildings by our engineers.
In conclusion, I would like to propose three conclusions.
First of all, seismic risks must be integrated into urban plan, planning up to the level of districts, not project.
Then the most efficient investments are the ones that you do in advance.
You work on soils, you do the basements more solids.
The third, you should collaborate with all the authorities at the local, municipal, international, national level.
We work on design on urban planning.
All the plans that we develop are analyzed by experts of our special services, quality, of development, a project of design are assessed by our experts, but you need to have institutional structures which could control the way these plans are being implemented, then we are working on a database today are working on it.
We want an interaction with all the partners in our EO systems.
We are now modernizing, we are reviewing data all the time so that the right decision could be taken, and this is the instrument which could help us in early warning systems so that we can provide for help before a catastrophe will arrive.
Kishnov is the possibility to make our cities safer.
The cities are being developed in a responsible way.
This is important.
Thank you for your attention.
Thank you very much.
I would like to give the floor now to Mr.
Alexandro Alio who is the Executive Director of the Department of Territorial Planning of Potenza in Italy.
Good afternoon.
Thank you for having provided me the possibility to share our experiences in this unique context in which the exchange of experiences is one of the best way to improve our activity.
We will describe a bit the situation in which we are working.
I represent a regional authority in the south of Italy.
It is an intermediate institution working with 100 municipalities and institute between the national and regional and local level.
Our history, we must contextualize the situation because we are talking about a situation in Italy, an Italian situation that is quite known.
We have a quite well working national civil protection system because we started with that.
We started with working with the civil protection.
After some severe earthquakes that we had in the late years of the last century, normally the a Belch earthquake in the late 60s, Fuli earthquake in the mid 70s, and then a very strong earthquake in the 80s, in 1980 in our region, the national system changed.
Let's say, there was a new legislation, innovative legislation national legislation that was built around preparedness is the civil protection but the civil protection around the preparedness risk assessment, and also forecast risk assessment, preparedness and post event recovery.
So In that period, these new legislation gave the opportunity to Italy to Italian region and also the territory to start organizing for earthquakes, for all the disasters.
When we started with our activity at the beginning of 2000, we worked very much a lot on assessing the situation of our regional territory, collecting data, we collected data about the vulnerability of the buildings and other assets, the exposure of the population, but also there were a lot of studies regarding the earthquakes, but also the other hazards that affects our territory.
We started working for building a very local civil protection system by putting together all the actors of the local governance, from the institution to the technical actors to the stakeholders, civil society Association, Civil Protection Association.
By working together, we established in the beginning of 2000, a civil protection system that worked for many years for spreading the knowledge for spreading the culture of the safety, the security, collecting data, elaborating this data, putting this data on GIS tools in order to elaborate scenarios and use these scenarios not only for preparing for the disasters, but also for trying to elaborate plans for the Urban and territorial development.
All this experience now is being transported into our main activity that we are coordinating, namely the the governance of the sustainable development and resilient development of our territory.
We elaborate a master plan in 2013 and is going to update where the earthquakes, the risk reduction is put at the basis of any sustainable development plans.
So from this experience, of course, we had a lot of engagement of activities in all these years.
And from these activities, I can try to find some inputs also to transfer to the other part to the other countries in order to improve their action regarding earthquake, but also other risks preparedness.
First of all, that the seismic risk must be integrated into urban planning and ASI policies.
It's not possible to take the risks, earthquakes and also the risk as standing alone.
We don't have to prepare just for emergencies.
We have to analyze the risk in order to be prepared in our everyday life, and so putting this element in our urban planning in order to be ready to improve our urban structure, our buildings to be resistant to earthquake and kind of hazards.
Second, that the preparedness requires more strong multi level governance.
In our case, we work with a lot, but it is still a challenge because when you have to put together institution at different levels of coordination from the national to the local and then a lot of stakeholders and civil society because we have this mechanism, is very difficult make this very huge mechanism working well because we have a lot of actors.
So these actors are independent from the others, let's say the mayors, let's say, we need a strong coordination on this.
Then another input is that resilience cannot improvised at the very last moment.
It must be prepared in advance.
When we build back better means that we collect data, we use this data and the governance mechanisms must be put in place before the disaster occurs.
Preparedness is a question of good governance advance.
Then we have to move.
In our case, we were also facilitated by some national mechanisms that were put in place for financing some improvements.
After the legislation, the national governments started putting resources for recovery, for restoring the building heritage and the infrastructure and it was a very long process, but we started improving our building heritage.
But we needed to move from risk assessment to bankable resilient investments.
This is one priorities that I want to stress and integrating risk earthquakes with other risk and taking into consideration that the risk must be integrated into one single action.
Of course, even if we are making a lot of progresses in this direction, challenges still remain.
One of the main challenges is the institutional fragmentation because still remains a challenge.
The limited technical and financial capacities, especially in small cities, in smaller municipalities, they cannot be left alone in this process because they have a lot of, let's say, challenges many other challenges to face in the ordinary activities.
Then we have in our case, we have also the vulnerability of historic settlements because this is one problem is the new legislation is good for the new construction, for the new infrastructure, for the new plants, but we have a very old and a very structured ancient heritage that is very difficult to cope with the new requirements of the legislation.
And so for this reason, our approach is to work with the municipalities to try to find a solution and to try to overcome the problems of linking together the requirements of the security of safety and the requirements of maintaining the old structure of our urban areas.
For this reason, I will just highlight two or three good practice, let's say, the action that we experimented in the last year this year.
One is to set up a governance system in our residence that put together all the stakeholder in order to work together and to produce a unique action both for the government of the territory and also for reducing risks and mainstreaming this risk together with the others.
In the last 20 years, let's say, in our case, we put in place a very huge program of interventions starting from our public heritage, the high school, namely, we invested more than 10,010 10,000 million of euros in order to refurbish our building stocks, putting together not only the seismic earthquake requirement, but also the energy efficiency, the climate change intervention to have safe and ecological buildings.
This is the other inputs that I want to stress, putting together a different kind of solution in order to optimize the intervention and to have a building stock that is a coherent with all that we face on our territory.
Let's say, now we are moving and conclude.
We are moving from disaster risk and integrating disaster risk also in other development programs and projects.
We are combin implementing this master plan that is a general resilience and sustainable development master plan.
Master plan of the region.
We are integrating different kinds of intervention at the urban level where the risk reduction is at the basis for any development.
Some bioteion have been presented also in another session of this forum that integrates urban regeneration with buildings requalification and social inclusion.
All together, we can optimize the investments and we can have a better response also for preparedness.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
As we are wrapping up, I would like to ask our last speaker, Mr.
Elija Azaro, who is the president of the American Institute of Architects, to help us summarize, if possible, some of what we have heard also with your own experience.
Thank you very much.
Summarize? Wow.
Well, it's great to be here.
Thank you for the invitation.
I'll be very brief because I know we're at time.
I think everything that was covered here is really extraordinary.
I do want to make sure that I put out there as the American Institute Architects, we're in 120 countries, we're an NGO and we are ready to be your partner.
We're already involved in these efforts, and we're part of the UNF triple C as the global ABCs.
Now, the important thing about what we do as architects is we take an oath for the health, safety, and welfare of the public and the organization is dedicated to building communities just like this panel has discussed, those that are sustainable, resilient, healthy, and equitable.
Two lessons learned from the field, have to drill down on something that was not stated specifically.
People talked about heritage, but what was not specifically stated was culture.
I responded to the disasters in Turkey.
I responded to the disasters in Japan after the Thooku disaster.
I've had the pleasure of working with Svetlana and her team, and I've been in Kyrgyzan and other places.
But the two that I want to bring to you is in Hitai when all of the displacement occurred.
We visited some of the primary schools in Iskandar and the headmaster had the most incredible cultural insight.
We asked, how can you accept all of these children? Aren't you overloaded? How will this work for the school year? He said, You don't understand.
This is the birthplace of the Mosaic.
You must take every piece that you find and rebuild.
He was not referring to the buildings, he was referring to the children.
Most of those children had lost at least one, if not multiple family members, and they were accepted as part of that new family.
He was looking to the future as, this is the most resilient piece that we have is the culture of place and the people who have experienced this for more than 1,000 years.
That was an amazing lesson to me as a responder evaluating buildings in a place that I hadn't been.
It was incredible.
The other one is from Japan.
This is very cultural.
I started working with Sendai City government and the whole areas of recovery.
They were spending such an enormous amount of money and coming from the US, we struggled with investing in resilience as we should.
Asking everyone from the highest levels of government all the way down to the individual worker at the site, and I asked the same question.
How can you justify spending so much money in rebuilding? Everyone said the same thing.
This is cultural, this is not rehearsed.
They said, What is the value of one human life? You must invest in human life.
If that is your goal, the cost of structure, infrastructure, and everything has no compelling issue with the expenditure.
Those are two of the things that I learned from the cultural side.
Then, of course, heritage was mentioned and the most vulnerable places that we have our heritage buildings.
That retrofit and the work that we do as architects, we are ready to be your partner, ready to contribute to that next level of codes and thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
With that, I thank also all the team and the interpreters that have supported us.
Wishing you a very good rest of the day and a big applause for everyone.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you.