ONE UN - Housing Resilience as an Urban Systems Challenge (WUF13)

Good afternoon, everyone.
I think we're going to get started so that we have enough time for all our speakers.
Good afternoon and welcome to the session on housing resilience as an urban systems challenge.
This is a One UN event, and my name is Helen Ning on behalf of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDR.
I would like to thank our partners and co organizers for this event, which is UN Habitat, UNDP, UN CDF, and UNEP for organizing this event together.
So as you're aware, this event is on housing.
So housing is increasingly increasingly emerging as one of the defining resilience challenges of our time, and of course, the theme for this wolf this year.
So in this session, we will discuss is we will move beyond housing as a single unit, but focusing on housing as a broader urban systems challenge.
So connected to land use, infrastructure, services, financing, governance, and social inclusion.
Strengthening housing resilience, therefore, requires coordinated action across sectors and across all levels of governance, and, of course, across the UN system, and that's why we put together in this UN one UN event.
So before we begin, housing is a topic that's really dear to the heart of our special representative of the Secretary-General for disaster risk reduction.
So I would like to share an opening video from Mr.
Kamal Kishar.
Excellencies, colleagues, and partners.
Thank you for coming together for this important conversation, and I'm sorry I cannot be with you in person.
Let me begin with a simple reminder.
Homes are where people should be safest and resilience must start there.
Every year, disasters displace millions of people from their homes and housing bears the greatest share of losses.
But this is not only a story of hazards, it is a story of choices.
The way we plan, build, finance, and govern housing systems determines whether risk is reduced or created.
Too often we treat housing as a standalone sector, but housing is where multiple risks converge.
It is connected to the systems that allow cities to function, transport, energy, water, health, livelihoods, and social networks.
That is why resilience must be approached as a systems challenge, not simply as a construction challenge.
This shows that integrating risk reduction into urban development is one of the smartest investments cities can make.
But no single actor can achieve this alone.
Building resilience at home is a shared responsibility.
Governments must lead through risk informed planning, enforcement of building standards, access to early warning systems, and policies that make resilience affordable, especially for the most vulnerable.
The private sector must prioritize long term resilience over short term gains through safer construction, responsible investment, and greater transparency of risk.
Households must be empowered with the knowledge, tools, and support to understand risks and shape decisions that affect their safety.
Colleagues, from recovery efforts around the world, one lesson is clear, we cannot afford to rebuild risk.
Recovery must be used to correct systemic weaknesses and build safer, more inclusive communities.
We already have the global frameworks to guide us, the Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction, the Paris Agreement, and the New Urban Agenda.
But implementation happens locally in cities, neighborhoods, and homes.
Ultimately, resilient housing and resilient cities cannot be separated.
Homes depend on functioning urban systems and cities cannot be resilient when large parts of the populations remain exposed and vulnerable.
This is also why I'm pleased to announce that the theme of the next International Day for disaster risk reduction will be resilience starts at home.
Let us move beyond fragmented approaches.
Let us align policy, finance, and practice, and let us ensure that resilience is not a privilege, but a foundation for all.
Because when we get housing right, we do more than reduce disaster risk.
We protect dignity, stability, and the future of our communities.
Thank you.
So with that, we'll begin the session.
We're very lucky today because we have two moderators for this session.
So for our first moderator, I would like to introduce Mr.
Ronald Jackson, head of the Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery for Building Resilience Crisis Bureau from UNDP.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Helen and distinguished representatives.
It is indeed my pleasure to serve as the moderator for these very, very important discussions, as you've heard from the SRSG, I certainly ascribe to the views that he has shared.
I'll be joined shortly by a few erudite speakers who will take you through the first part of the panel discussion as Helen indicated.
But before I invite them onstage, let me offer just some framing remarks and perhaps a little bit briefly around how UNDP is also engaged in partnership with UN habitat and UNDR among others in really addressing this very, very important issue.
So housing resilience has become a critical global priority as urbanization, climate change, disasters, environmental degradation, socioeconomic instability increases and continue to increasingly strain housing systems worldwide.
These are not isolated pressures.
They affect the full urban system, including land governance, infrastructure services, environmental health institutions, and community well being.
As you would have heard from the SRSG, this is really a systems issue, a whole of systems issue.
Because housing represents the largest share of urban infrastructure and the main locus of vulnerability in cities, these cascading risks are disproportionately felt in the housing sector.
The challenge is indeed global.
In the global south, rapid urban growth informality and service deficits creates acute fragilities while in the global north, aging housing stock, demographic shifts, climate hazards, and financialization are increasing exposure.
In both contexts, housing resilience must be understood not simply as a question of housing supply, but as a systemic urban challenge.
This session today responds to a gap in global urban dialogue by positioning housing resilience as a cross cutting issue that connects disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, climate mitigation, environmental risk management, urban planning and design, service continuity, and social inclusion.
It also highlights housing resilience as a key lever for implementing major global frameworks such as the Paris Agreement, the New Urban Agenda, the Sendai Framework, and the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly goal 11.
The objective of today's discussion is to build a shared understanding of the housing resilience as a systems issue and to identify practical ways for cities and partners working on cities issues to embed resilience across the housing policy, land use planning, building code development, and most importantly, financing and implementation through the full resilience cycle from risk reduction and preparedness recovery through to the resilience building opportunities.
The discussion will also help inform a joint UN initiative on resilient housing aimed at strengthening collaboration and scaling support to countries and cities.
UNDP is certainly delighted to play a part in this under the new urban agenda, UNDP and UN Habitat have signed an enhanced collaboration framework which covers Five key areas, supporting countries to develop national urban policies, help national and local governments develop effective and innovative financing frameworks, strengthen countries and cities capacity to fulfill climate action commitments, strengthen urban resilience by adopting integrated approaches, and of course, applying digital transformation technologies.
Within the context of that, UNDP has defined a strategy that covers several of these particular areas and in our main strategy, particularly focusing on the issue of urban resilience, We have sought to bring a sharper focus on neglected geographies where greatest capacity gaps exist, such as small, medium, and transitioning cities.
Strengthening urban governance by bridging the gap between national policy and city level implementation, engaging a wide range of stakeholders and ensuring that urban development and services cater to the specific needs and vulnerabilities of weaker segments of the urban communities.
We're also looking at augmenting capacities of less resource cities to manage multidimensional risks through well financed, risk informed urban development planning, and investments.
Last, we're helping to expand innovation for resilient urban futures by harnessing the potential of innovative and digital technologies.
Already, we are active in over 50 cities, working with 50 municipalities worldwide.
With that, let me take this opportunity to invite my erudite panelists to the platform.
My first panelist is Mr.
Jordi Maas Herrero.
He's the Director General for housing, For the regional government of Catalonia, let me invite you.
Let me also invite miss Aula Resana, the Deputy Mayor of Tirana.
Mr.
Bilal Hussein, Deputy Mayor of the City of Tripoli, Lebanon.
Miss Elizabeth Franko, Municipal Secretary of Urban Planning, licensing of the City of Su Paula.
But before we hear from our panelists, we have two very important opening presentation to further help to set the scene.
I have Raph Ts, I hope I'm presenting that correctly, the Director for Global Solutions Division of UN Habitat, who I will invite to bring some opening framing remarks for the panel discussion.
Thanks, Ronald, for the introduction.
On behalf of the Executive Director of UN Habitat, first of all, thank you for being present here at this World Urban Forum.
I think the discussion today is very, very relevant connecting housing and resilience as an urban system challenge.
We are here, indeed, at the moment of convergence where rapid urbanization, climate change, and environmental degradation are coming together not as isolated pressures, but as colliding forces, and they are undermining housing systems across the world.
It is not just where people live, it is the largest share of our urban infrastructure.
It's the primary spot of vulnerability in our cities and when disaster strikes, it's housing that bears the biggest burden.
Now disasters are affecting more than 150 million people every year, causing hundreds of billions of dollars of losses with housing disproportionately impacted every single time.
That's why we're here today and that's why this conversation is so important.
The pressures on housing are systemic.
They go beyond the physical structure, they go into land, governance, into infrastructure networks, basic service provision, environmental health, institutional capacity, and community well being.
As Ronald has rightly pointed out, this affects both cities in the global south that face acute structural fragilities, but also cities in the global north that are far from immune.
These risks interact and cascade across sectors.
They converge on housing, amplifying displacement, disrupting services, and deepening long term vulnerability and no region, no city, no community is untouched.
We must change how we frame this problem.
The housing crisis is not simply a deficit of units, it's a failure of systems and that requires, of course, a systemic response.
Resilience approach reframes the challenge entirely.
It connects disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, urban planning, service continuity and social inclusion in one coherent lens.
It demands that we act across the full resilience cycle, foresight, risk reduction, crisis response recovery, and reconstruction, as was also adopted in a resolution of our UN Habitat Assembly in 2023.
When we embed resilience into housing policies, into land use decisions, into building codes, planning standards, construction practices, and financing, we're not just protecting homes, we are protecting people, economies, and the future of our cities.
So housing resilience is not a niche agenda.
It's a key lever for delivering our most important global commitments, and Ronald has named them.
If we get housing resilience right, we also unlock progress on all of these global agendas simultaneously.
And that's a strategic opportunity we cannot afford to miss.
But seizing this opportunity requires to address two critical gaps.
One is governance.
We must strengthen institutional capacities at local and national levels so that governments can deliver resilience for all, not just for the ones with means.
The second is finance.
We must leverage catalytic and blended finance solutions while rigorously safeguarding affordability and fiscal sustainability.
Because risk knowledge must drive housing plans, investment decisions, and policy not as an afterthought, but as a foundation.
Today's event itself is a signal of what is possible.
Organized by UNDRR, UNEP, UNDP, and UN Habitat, reflects a shared conviction that the time for siloed responses are over.
We are launching a joint initiative to consolidate science policy advice and technical assistance to help countries and cities build housing systems that are resilient by design, not by accident.
The outcomes of this event will feed directly into the design of that initiative and to ongoing efforts to operationalize integrated approaches that reduce risk, protect the right of adequate housing, and support long term urban transformation.
The message is very simple.
Housing resilience is not a technical footnote.
It's a defining challenge of our time and a defining opportunity.
So let's rise to it together.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Rap.
Certainly, the importance of embedding resilience into the housing policy, looking at housing as a lever, as you say, for delivering on the key commitments and the importance of tackling these two critical gaps, governance and finance, which I think are central to really unlocking the whole system.
Lastly, the efforts, you know, moving forward in leveraging science and research to drive policy, I think all quite commendable references.
Now let me invite Gulna Role, chief sectoral transition sector or section at UNP to provide some opening reflections.
Thank you so much.
Yes, thank you so much to and Dara, UNDP, inhabitat.
To the colleagues to actually for convening this session in order to indeed launch this joint cooperation on resilient housing.
Um, it's very important to be exchanging and working together and to understand what direction we're going together.
Because what we heard from Claude Rosbach at the opening session, like what is a huge challenge with housing, especially informal housing.
We heard yesterday, for instance, that in many countries, informal housing is 70, 80%, of the existing housing, so how we deal with those issues.
So, you know, the challenge is enormous and especially the adaptation of the housing sector into, into policies, into the practices, into the finance is very important.
Each agency is agencies, but also distinguished cities, and we're really excited actually to listen today to all the cities, to hear about the needs, and also to collect from the national governments and private sector today.
Uh, to understand what are the kind of priority actions we can do together from UP side, maybe just to say that, first of all, we are really trying to hear from other stakeholders and organize all the stakeholders and this is something we would like to bring into into this discussion.
A UNP, we are hosting secretariats of platforms of partnerships.
For instance, there is a global alliance for Buildings and construction, which brings together 380 organizations together, including national governments, local governments, 38% of the partnerships members actually private sector.
Academia and two weeks ago, we had a a Lausan building summit where we discussed what was the priorities in what concerns the housing and about the priorities, we outlined that.
First of all, we see that thermal performance and passive cooling.
From UNP side, I passive cooling, thermal performance would be really the first topic and today we speak also with National Bank of India.
For instance, we work on the BCL program.
Where we're looking into how we deal with extreme heat at the city level, at the national level in the climate change perspective, how we deal with this? There is a very big B program in India where we're looking into the finance instruments, into the governance issues.
You hear a bit more today from the Indian perspective and how vulnerable groups deal with this.
It's super expensive to you cannot get ACS for every family, especially in formal settlements.
So what are the cost effective solutions to deal with this? And in many cities, and say, for instance, Tirana, we know that urban design was used urban design, the greenery in the city was used so well to address extreme heat, for instance.
So we would be really happy as a kind of global environmental authority contribute to this initiative on this kind of passive cooling and thermal performance part.
Secondly, the global As building construction is doing a very in depth work on the building materials, both on the traditional building materials.
This is where, again, maybe to put into discussion today, what is the role of the discussion on the building materials and especially how we deal with the building materials for the informal sector.
We heard yesterday in Latin America, 80% of the housing is informal, is self built.
So how we provide to the population who are building their own housing the materials which are not necessarily traditional cement.
Maybe it's a low carbon cement.
Maybe we're using less cement, where maybe we're building less for more through modular construction, so it's through the better design, and of course, how we're using the biomaterials, but biomaterials more.
I think this is where Global Alliance for building construction will be happy contribute with.
The third issue and this is where our cooperation with your habitat is very, very strategic, the urban design, urban planning, how we use the urban planning, and also how through urban planning we are connecting buildings with water, transport, energy, sanitation, and green areas.
Because in Lausanne at the Lausanne Building Summit, this is one of the conclusions that a urban planning is sometimes used separately through the built environment discussion.
Built environment discussions should be including strong, in a much stronger way the urban planning as an instrument for decarbonization, but also for improving quality of life.
Just also to say that in addition to Global Alliance for Building Construction, we also are Secretariat intergovernmental committee on Buildings and climate, which was established here in Baku at the Cop 29.
Which was taking place here at the same study, actually.
Here two years ago, there was an establishment government established ICBC and our strong political connection to the housing topic is the Blem call for action, which was by the established ICBC was launched last year in Blem at the cop 30 uh, which calls for bringing together affordability, sustainability.
So if you are looking at affordability, you cannot look at it without sustainability because as also our deputy Executive Director, Elia Mima today, stressed that when developer builds a house and trying to use the cheapest materials, so he or she would be putting the costs of maintaining this housing, to the people who will be living there.
If there will be floods, it will be extreme heat and they use cheap materials which are not environmentally sustainable, not climate resilient, then this will be the people paying for this.
How we address this issue, looking forward for the discussion here.
Thank you.
Wonderful thoughts.
Thank you very much, Chief Role.
You reminded us of the major challenge facing us the 70% to 80% of the informal housing stock that we're having to grapple with, the importance of the voice of the stakeholders and we're going to hear from them pretty soon because I think the panelists represent a very, very important voice that ought to guide those of us who are converging to provide the tailored support driven by the voice of those stakeholders.
The issues of passive cooling and thermal performance, particularly in the instance of extreme heat, which we're grappling with, the city certainly being the theater of most of the challenges we're grappling with in the future, the need for us to look for cost effective solutions, and this question of affordability and sustainability working in tandem.
Let me turn now to, as I said before, our distinguished panelists who will help to, you know, get us oriented around these issues certainly from the context within which they operate.
Our first speaker that I will invite to the podium, Mr.
Jordi Mas Herrero, and you've already heard he's the Director General for Housing and the Regional Government of Catalonia.
Jordi, let me hand the floor over to you and you have a clicker there.
Okay.
Thank you very much for inviting us to the organization.
I have a presentation that I will share with you.
Let me explain to you that Catalonia is a Spanish regional government with a lot of competencies related to housing, and our capital is Barcelona City, probably you know the city as well.
And if you are guessing, yes, I am a supporter of the Barcelona football team because many people ask about this.
So I need to I think this is.
Let's talk about heating and about extreme heat, what is happening in our country.
Here you can look at two maps.
The first map is related to the climatic zones.
We defined, well, the Spanish Technical Building Code defined in 2006, and according to these climatic zones, all the energy performance certificates are calculated in order to define the needs of the all the housing stock in Catalonia.
Now we are defining our uh a strategic plan for renovation with Nori 12050.
We are now studying all the new data we have, and we have discovered that now in 2026, almost all the municipalities have jumped to another climatic zone a the warmer zone, both in winter and summer.
And that has not been a surprise because we have all an age and we have been experiencing this change in the climate of the area.
But what is also worrying us is that in 20 years more, we will have in Barcelona City, for instance, the climate of Almeria, which is almost desertic region in southern Spain.
So what are we going to do with this? How are we going to deal with this silent disaster? Because deaths by heat are rising in Catalonia every year, and it will worse.
It will go worse.
Another data I want to share with you is that the cooling systems are rising in the housing stock.
In 2016, 22% of households had a cooling system installed and now it is 45%.
We are doubling in ten years, we are doubling the number of cooling systems.
It means that the energy used in summer for cooling is increasing.
But there's an apparent paradox because we have a good news is that even with rising coaling demand, the total acclimatization energy used is set to fall because warmer winters cut hidden consumption.
I mean, excuse me, because I'm reading and I'm not used to read.
I don't have to use warmer winters cut heating consumption faster than cooling adds to summer demand.
So our consumption in summer is rising, but in winter is lowering more.
So at the end, it seems like the energy the total energy consumption is falling down.
But this is unjust today.
The question here is the path we are having.
And what we see is that in the future, all this consumption will rise and especially that the vulnerable homes are less prepared against heat against cold, okay.
So we are working on several renovation strategies for the future.
We think that we have to increase low cost high impact measures in order to be able to renovate as much houses as possible in the next years.
Prioritize roof insulation, especially in warmer areas because in Catalonia, we have also high mountains close to the frontier with France.
But in the coastal areas, we will have to increase the roof insulation.
We have to electrify all the installations in order to reduce the consumption of petroleum, and we have to target vulnerable areas.
We think that we should address direct public action to economically vulnerable neighborhoods.
This is a strategic plan for residential renovation is talking about using six main implementation instruments, six tools, local one stop shops because in our country, many of the housing stock is multifamily buildings based.
So the ownership is divided between the different families living in the houses.
They are owned by the people who's living there.
So we need to introduce local local one stop shops in order to help all these communities to these homeowner associations to decide to do the renovation.
We want to introduce targeted subsidize mainly in vulnerable neighborhoods.
Long term financing, channeling European Investment Bank funds through the Catal Institute of Finance.
We are now designing a public procurement platform, an online platform connecting owners with contractors in order to get better prices and do it cheaper.
Electrification programs.
I mean, we will have all these targets that sus these are going to go oriented to the improvement of the building itself, its construction.
But at the same time, we have to work about the electrification of all the systems, and we have to work a lot about communication and training in order to have the society prepared to do the change.
And that is all.
Thank you very much, and we will continue the discussion.
My apologies.
So Jordan was responding to a very important question, and let me just read it since I did not provide it upfront to give context.
Catalonia has been at the forefront of addressing housing affordability.
As cities face rising housing costs alongside increasing climate risk.
How is Catalonia balancing affordability, social inclusion, and resilience in its housing policy and planning decisions? So you gave us really a good insight into how you're utilizing risk analytics to provide better decision intelligence to drive the housing sector policy and you really gave us that upfront.
Of course, amidst the challenges, you pointed out to some of the benefits that are being derived yet against the backdrop of whether or not it is, in fact, reducing risks.
It's something you're looking into, very important.
You've shared with us four renovation strategies and six accompanying instruments to deliver on the implementation.
We will get a chance to come back to your presentation, but thank you for those insights.
I want to now turn to miss Anuela or Deputy Mayor from Tiana.
Mayor, could you share Tana's experience with integrating risk informed land use planning, upgrading informal settlements, and investing in infrastructure systems that support housing resilience.
It would be great to learn more about how Tiana coordinates across national and local levels, engaging communities and partners, particularly with the private sector to deliver safer and more affordable housing.
I yield the floor to you.
Thank you so much.
Good afternoon, everybody.
For those of you who work, especially in city management, you know that we have no bigger enemy than time.
And so I'm going to really cut short and spare you a little bit of these patches.
We talk a lot about, you know, certain examples and practices, and I could be showing you a little bit of what we do with affordable housing, with subsidies, with rent bonuses.
I could be telling you about increasing green spaces.
But the issue here is not a systematic failure.
This housing crisis today is a society's failure.
We as a society have failed, not just in housing, but in managing our resources in their entirety.
I know that you most of you come to these events every year, and we keep dropping these challenges and especially in housing that has become more and more hot during the last years.
Rightfully so, there's a global south, challenges of infrastructure and physical resilience.
Your house could crumble on your head.
And then there's a global north where you basically cannot afford it.
The both issues fall into the same place.
This is all an issue of resources.
So whether we subsidize housing for young people in the north and then have models on how the global South eventually, when they have homes that they can stand, can also afford them.
Or we do the opposite, we're still talking about resources.
The reason why we're in this room is because obviously those resources are not sufficient, they're not being channeled the right way.
But it is not just an issue of housing, an overarching issue of how we are allocating resources in a society where we're not putting barriers to how we develop or how we construct or how accessible land is to people.
The primary factor of land use today in the world is being able to afford it.
Is not the relevance of the land, not the fact that land is public domain, is not the fact that, no human being can actually own land forever, but it is if you can afford it.
Professor Shlomo from NYU has calculated that for every single person and expansion in demographics, we need to expand in land at least six times.
In today's building of our citizen or space, we're not doing that.
We're having people expand 100 times if they have one child, and we're having people not being able to even spend one more meter because they cannot afford it.
So there's a problem right there, not because of the resources not being there, but because the access to the resource is not equitable, is not fair.
So what do you do in an occasion where the issue is not really resources because we can spend of our money in new air conditioning like our colleague from NYC is doing.
Every New Yorker who cannot afford to have air conditioning will get free air conditioning.
We're just buying a bunch of equipment, and then next year we'll have more powerful air conditioning because, of course, the summer will be more heated.
And of course, we'll have new ways to be more efficient and solving some of those energy efficient related issues.
But those are all patches.
There's one opportunity for us here that is more cost efficient and is more sustainable and more resilient, and that's building community.
In today's society, we have underestimated the fact that community is the most resilient tool that we have as urban planners, as city managers, as policymakers, as international institutions.
And why is that? Practical terms.
If today's average family aims to have private housing with a big yard, that means multiple yards in which maximum four people will access.
If we build communities and in our cities, we create space and we make public the space in between housing, then we are having massive playgrounds for multiple people, for hundreds of people to spend time in a qualitative and in a healthy way.
And not just because we all need space, because we all do, but because in that space, we need to interact.
And without the interaction, our yards will be bigger and there'll be less use, and our space will be smaller for those who cannot afford it.
So how does this come in practical terms in terms of urban planning, in terms of city planning? Well, one of the tools is to make public all land that is developed but not used because of the footprint of the building.
Let's say here in Baku, we're building a complex of residential buildings, and it's a private investment.
So 5,000 people will be housed.
The space in between the buildings, because of regulations that we set in place and because of the criteria that we have for our urban planning, for our greenery, for our infrastructure, that whole space is not just private property of that particular development and that particular developer, it is a public park.
It is a public space where people who could also be coming from neighborhoods that are not as well made and they're not as well built can access and can have access to that same particular space.
What we're doing is we're saving from all the land use of private gardens.
We're saving from all the land use of gated communities, and we're opening it up so that people not just get to know each other, but they have a more efficient way of living with each other.
I don't want to bore you with issues of how you build or how you have rights to the land.
But the core issue here is that sustainable housing and resilient housing cannot come in isolation, cannot come in unsustainable ways of meaning.
If anybody has been to a business school 20 years ago, there was this thing that they would teach you efficiency.
Everybody who's done business has had a class on efficiency.
20 years ago, what we called efficiency was basically how much money would you save if you get something from China instead of making it at home.
Nobody was accounting for environmental costs.
Nobody was accounting for the impact in the environment.
We don't have that now, but what we're doing is we're falling within the same patterns with AI, which we are all implementing in our systems without really accounting for the long term damage that is doing to the environment, the long term damage that it is doing to ecosystems, and the resources that it is depleting.
So we cannot account for resilience in housing with just the building material, the land planning.
We just have to account for it on the entirety of how society uses resources and with the fact that we have to come to terms that this way of living, our way of living in isolation and without building a strong community cannot really bring about any resilience at all.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Deputy Mayor.
I think you started off with a very important point of reflection, that the housing crisis is a societal failure, how we manage resources in its entirety.
I think that will stay with me certainly from your offering.
The importance of meshing quality and affordability is an outcome.
Mentioning that quality and affordability is an outcome of this failure.
Um, use the issue of how we use and allocate resources, and of course, the exceedance and imbalance in our expansion per capital compared to the prescribed standards.
Of course, you shared some insights into what's happening on Tarana in terms of addressing some of the housing needs.
All very critical points of reflection.
I want to know invite Mr.
Bilal Hussein.
He is the deputy So, Deputy Bilal Hussein, the City of Tripoli, I guess he's the deputy mayor of the city of Tripoli.
For you, sir, the question for you is, like many cities are managing overlapping crisis and institutional constraints.
Can you share your experiences on how you are embedding disastrous production, climate adaptation, and service continuity into housing policies, land use decisions, building codes, and urban development decisions.
The floor is yours.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for hosting me today.
I'll be here presenting Tripoli municipality or Tripoli as a city.
We're a city in north of Lebanon.
In fact, we're a city that's facing right now a housing disaster, let's call it.
When we were elected as a city council, a couple of weeks after that, buildings started collapsing and it was really a disaster.
In less than one month, we had three buildings collapsing, resulting in 16 casualties and resulting in a general feel in the city that there is no safety in the city at all.
But what happened? Why did it happen? It happened just because of several causes that were done through years.
One of them is the absence of rule of law in a country like Lebanon.
In fact, we had lots of the politicians, for example, allowing people to just build over the buildings that they already have that you can see a building designed to have only four floors having six or seven or eight floors, which is resulting in a disastrous disaster on the structure of the building.
We already have the absence of the restoration policies, we don't have any policies at the central government to say that we need to be restoring in the city at all.
Uh, in addition to the problem of the devaluation of the Lebanese lira, in fact, we have lots of our rentees rented their houses at a cost back in the 1980s and now they're sitting in the same houses.
Why? Because in the 1990s, we had a devaluation of the Lebanese lira, the Lebanese lira to be from around $1 per lira to right now to back then, 1,500 Lebanese liras per $1.
Right now, we had another devaluation until it happened to be right now around 90,000 Lebanese lis for US dollars.
In fact, right now, we have people renting their houses for $1 a year.
So, who will be who will be renovating this house? Like, definitely the owner wouldn't do it, and definitely that person who is renting it won't do it because, in fact, he's sitting for free.
Like to do it? And it's not his house.
So we have a problem here.
It's a policy problem.
Is this the agreement? What did we do? We had this problem, what should we do? Right now, we're municipality, we're in charge, we should be doing the work that should be done.
That's why we created something called a Apo emergency fund.
This fund, mainly we created the process that you are seeing right now.
First of all, we had a hotline and then after people call to register, that the buildings are under a danger of collapse.
In fact, we had around 850 claims that their houses are really under this danger.
We had this rapid structural assessment, and then we used to classify the risks and to just go and immediately evacuate some buildings because in fact, we were seeing buildings collapsing.
We were seeing casualties on the street.
Then we went to humanitarian assistance in which the Mosa the Ministry of Social Affairs was supporting through NDP also, or I think it was through WFP through World Food Program.
Ministry of Health was supporting and WFP was providing cash in addition to the Hi relief Council paying the people money for shelter for around one year.
But the problem is that this is only one year and in fact, after one year, what will happen? We're talking about, let me just show you the numbers.
We're talking about 836 buildings that were requiring assessments.
The number of assessed buildings up until today are 555, 53 were immediately evacuated because they are immediately under risk of falling.
But the other 502 should be rehabilitated very soon, and if they weren't rehabilitated very soon, we're having also a problem of them that might be collapsing also in a couple of years.
And here is the dashboard.
We created a dashboard showing what's happening.
And if you can see, there you can see that it's really divided between the new part of the city and the old part of the city.
Most of the buildings that are under danger are in the old part of the city and you can see like it's really like divided where the less developed area is and where the less people with less income are living there in that city.
That part.
We created this Apoli emergency fund it was in collaboration with the Order of Engineers in Tripoli.
It was also in collaboration with the Lebanese Red Cross, with also the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Higher Relief Council.
This was a coordination mechanism between the government, between the local governance, and also the civil society, whether it's the Lebanese Red Cross or the syndicate of Engineers.
Right now we're there.
At least we stop the collapsing of the buildings or we stopped the casualties.
But in fact, we still have a long way in front of us in order to really create the policies that could help us in a more sustainable manner for the future.
Uh, in fact, we are talking about this city with this problem.
In fact, we have also internally displaced people who are right now living in Tripoli because Tripoli is considered in the north of Lebanon and in the north of Lebanon, we don't have the shelling from the Lean Israeli Lebanon war.
So in fact, it's kind of a safe space, or safe area of which lots of the internally displaced people are coming there.
We also host refugees from Syria.
We used to host refugees from Syria since 2011 and also right now we host the new refugees.
We call them newcomers.
Those came to Lebanon after the war and the coastal area in Syria within the new regime.
So all of these overlapping problems are there in the city while we are trying with very limited resources to support.
In fact, I will just take at the end put our problems into five different points.
One of them is the technical know how.
We need support in the technical know how.
Coordination, we're trying to do as much as we can, but still we need lots to do coordination.
The financing, and it's a huge problem.
We have projects right now that we might be implementing, but they need financing.
The data.
We're trying as much as we can to create the data right now.
All the support, the work that's done within the Apo emergency fund right now is creating the data about it and the main important for sustainability is finding the real policies that we should be developing in the whole country to avoid such a disaster in the future.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Deputy Hussein.
Let me now turn to the final speaker in this section, miss Elizabeth Franke, who is going to be speaking on the case of Sau Paula.
For Sau Paula, a city facing both large scale housing deficits and growing climate risks such as flooding, how are you integrating disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation into housing policies and informal settlement upgrading at scale and what are the main trade offs you face between affordability, resilience, and implementation.
The floor is yours.
No.
No question.
No.
No.
Well, good afternoon, everybody.
I will show and talk about S Paolo experience.
So Paul is a global south metropoli with 12 million inhabitants and third part of the population living in precarious conditions.
It's an example how we are acting to transform S Paolo in a Hialan city.
Well, this is some pot in poor areas that you observe flooding landscape, overlapped urban infrastructure, et cetera has all cities and poor areas of the world.
You work it's es to work with new approach that use, new housing, resilience systems, and territorial inclusion.
The Paul strategy is now working three pillars.
Paul day is to integrate upgrading informal settlements, qualifier resettlements in high risk areas, and acclimate adaptation when urban planning.
The first pillar is integrated upgrading of informal settlements.
Combining the interventions that everybody work informal settlements, land regularization, urban infrastructure, et cetera the central objective of the pillar one is to reduce vulnerabilities while preventing territorial and social ties the population.
Second pillar is qualifying the resettlement in high risk areas.
Guiding principle to maintain the population if possible and rest the families that are really living in risk areas that is impossible to transform areas that they could live in And the third pillar is the adaptation oriented by urban planning.
The goal is to transform this community and say, more compact and more sustainable urban growth.
This is the structural tensions that challenge in this area, the poor areas.
The challenge safe location.
Work with resilience system but looking for the costs that be limits and social origins in our time.
So now, this is our integrated strategy, how you address the housing de in a climate contest.
That is a new issue in so global work the climate contest.
Is our strategies, integrating upgrading of informal setments, geotechnical and inteological risk reduction, infrastructure improvements, land regularization, and construct more units to resettle people that live in risk areas.
Our main challenge the affordability, resilience scale in our central challenge, the most accessible areas for vulnerable people that live in scars in poor conditions.
Well, some lessons for our international debate and lessons from our activity in So Paulo, we have a lot of big programs that you are integrated to poor communities that live in risk areas.
The lessons that There is no urban climate potential don't addressing territorial inequality.
The second is housing and climate policies must be integrated.
The third lesson is the importance of regulation guarantee the land tenure to the families.
It's very important for us in San Paul and in Brazil in general.
Hood familiar in risk areas, acquires a qualified territorial and social approach.
It is very important because the ties in these families that live in urban conditions are very strong and urban planning is a key tool for a climate adaptation.
Final message to our cities in front of this problem.
There is no resilient seats without urban inclusion.
It's ness to work with the three issue adequate housing, territorial planning, and of the inequalities.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, miss Franco.
Now, we've started a little bit late and I really want to give a chance to the second set of panelists to be able to offer their contributions.
I'm going to skip questions now and if we have time at the end, we will maybe pose questions to all the panelists together.
Let me invite our next moderator, who will take us through the second half of the panel.
Mohamed, let me yield the floor to you and your team.
Thank you.
But definitely some applause to the colleagues just leaving the panel.
Really great job.
And I would like to very quickly introduce the next panel, asking them because of the time to make their way to the podium right now, Mr.
Shri Sanje, the managing Director of National Housing Bank of India, Mariana Puscos, the principal specialist with CAF, and Yogurt, the senior Project Officer with the Asian Development Bank.
Please make your way to the podium.
Much appreciated.
Colleagues, we're going to make this session interesting.
So I first want you to stand up, stand up.
It's going to be a new energy.
And this is a really renewed energy because this is about finance.
This is about the money.
Sit down.
Have a seat.
This is the whole point.
The whole point is that we spent the first part of this great session talking about systems.
We talked about how we can create resilient systems, especially in how we look at the intersection between climate risk.
We talk about disaster preparedness, urban planning, we talked about infrastructure.
But none of this is going to happen if you have no access to finance.
This is really where it starts to hit hard if you're coming from the global South.
This is where it becomes painful discussion if you're from a least developed country, from a low income country, from seeds, because the reality is, please put the slide up.
I just want to share with you one slide very quickly, if you don't mind.
We've heard over the last few days, big statements that capital is there.
That's correct.
There's a lot of capital out there and that the problem with capital is that some are saying we don't have sufficient unbankable pipeline.
You've heard that a lot, right? You've also heard some saying, No, it's actually an issue of markets.
We don't have markets to invest.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, there's a much bigger problem there.
The bigger problem is that reality, if you look at all the data of all the IFIs, DFIs, MDBs out there for the last decade, the vast majority of money has been flowing to middle income countries and higher.
Insignificant portion is going to low income countries, that countries, and that's where the major urban problems and challenges.
If we hear, we're in a global crisis, it's catastrophic when it comes to these countries.
That's the reality.
Go to the next slide.
This is where the most of the world is in categories that are uninvestable in the eyes of capital holders.
This is why this conversation is important.
We're not here to talk about statements.
It's important that we start to talk about implementation.
How can we unlock that money and make it go down where it is needed to the countries that need it where urban development takes even a lower percentage of that.
Without any further ado, I want the colleagues here today and I gave them a challenge and trust me, I shuffled things around just before they arrived here.
I told them, we're going to be honest, we're going to be interactive.
My first question is going to Mariana.
Mariana, you're coming from a DFI.
This challenge is something of reality to you.
My question to you, how can development banks, IFIs and MDBs out there, but from your perspective right now, look at solutions to unlock finance for urban housing systemically, especially that are there structures that can absorb your capital, maybe blended finance structures that can be considered? Is there systemic structures that can basically absorb your capital, crowd in additional private sector for resilient housing? I want to ask you that one, and then I want to come in with another part of it.
Maybe you can answer that one first.
Thank you, and thank you for the invitation.
As you say, I come from Latin America and I'm going to switch to Spanish if you allow me.
So from the point of view of development banks, we from the American Caribbean and Latin American and development bank, what we work on is the fact that something's bankable, something's financable when you can measure it, and when you can assign it.
And what that actually demands of us is that we have to integrate risk measurement within our instrumentalization of these instruments and tools, and we have to do that from the development and planning stage and not verifying at a later stage down the line.
So in terms of structuring these projects, this stage, this prior work that has to be done with the cities and governments, both local and national is key.
Preparation of those projects, analysis of the risk involved, definition of standards and coordination even within different tasks that governments have to do when they have to articulate housing projects with risk management, with infrastructure, and with services all contemplated beforehand is what actually makes possible for us a structurization that's more robust and that actually allows us to be able to open the door to commercial banking and private capital.
Given that we work as risk reducers, that's our role.
We work to reduce risk for that sector.
And in answer to your question, can we work with blended finance? Yes, we can.
We can do a lot as banks.
We can do guarantees.
We can do special financing vehicles, we can do trusts, and we can do this.
This is something that most multilaterals can do.
Perhaps what the Caribbean Latin American Development Bank does is that we can do it in a joint way between the public and private sectors and we can create mixed banking tools that cooperate and collaborate and we do that in our sectarial way with our finance areas so as to be able to support the structuring of those projects, both when they come from the public sector and when they come from the private sector, and we can thereby help that way.
Not all banks have the ability to do that in terms of what their organization allows them to do, but I think that our bank, the CAF, does have that and that's a great advantage that we have and we should strategically make the most of that.
We should make the most of that so as to be able to support these measures that we're speaking about.
Thank you so much and I really appreciate this perspective, but I want to go to reality a little bit, Ryan and co me with this question.
By the way, these are not prepared questions, so I'm putting them on the spot.
Okay.
Cities still face the challenge of accessing finance directly.
The truth is, irrespective of how goodwill we want to have from the DFIs and MDBs and IFIs and you saw all that big numbers out there, the money is not flowing.
But let's say we want to because you have the capability maybe to support creating structures that would allow that capital to flow.
But the reality is that cities have bottlenecks in accessing that structure.
They face challenges.
What are these challenges? Let's just put them out there on the table and can you maybe suggest solutions of how these can be overcome over to you? Yeah.
The first thing I'm sorry.
The first thing that I would like to say First off, definitely, there is a systemic risk.
Yes, it is.
And it's systemic, but it's actually dealt with in silos.
That happens because housing is managed in one place.
Planning and town planning and the whole how you're going to work with the territory is dealt with somewhere else and basic funding somewhere else, and the articulation between these sectors is what makes the task even more difficult when you come to structure those projects to make them bankable, especially at a subnational level.
And so the second difficulty is that the projects, they actually require and specifically projects that should incorporate issues of risk within their design and their structuring and their measuring of desired results.
The problem is that the local teams don't have the skill set, the technical skill set.
They don't have the know how when it comes to institutional coordination.
They lack the resources to do that.
And that's why ourselves as a development bank, we have to the onus is on us to find a way to access that in a way to basically support the development of those sub national governments and for them to upscale.
CAF has given itself a target as the bank of Latin America and the Caribbean to be a bank for sub national governments.
And our work with subnational governments is very strong in some countries.
We're very strong in that area and we can do it.
It can be done, but it has to be done with a project pipeline and that project pipeline has to be duly structured and it has to have the necessary requirements so as to be able to access this type of funding and not necessarily the sub national governments have those capacities to be able to access resources from institutions such as ours and our dialogue ends and being stuck at the national level and we have given ourselves that task.
As CAF, we have said, how do we get to that other level, that extra level? How can we go down a layer to the sub national government, not just the big ones, Sala, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, but also the small governments, the municipal ones.
How do we channel that funding so that it gets to those cities and towns which are those which have less capacity and which in general are most needy of this type of funding? Thanks.
Much very excellent, excellent, actually, response.
And this is a nice segue because it helps me, maybe I'll move to Sanjay.
I Okay.
So let's assume at the national level, we have structures that would allow capital to start to be drawn down from DFIs, from IFIs, from MDBs, because we can't just, you know, depend to meet the infrastructure gap just on fiscal resources.
That's just out of the question, okay? We all know that.
We're expert to know that there's not enough funding.
So if we are to bring that and assuming there are, let's say, national housing finance systems in place, How can we make sure that they can be positioned not just to respond to the requirements of DFIs and IFIs in terms of money being lent to them, but how can they be responsive to the needs of the local people so low income households are not phased out of that type of financing? How can we make sure that it is incentivized for resilience, that it is, let's say, for example, lending criteria, subsidies, insurance, et cetera, can we actually ensure that these national systems are in place in the right way? Good evening and thank you for having me here.
I come from the world's seventh largest country and probably the most populated or the numbers are not officially out.
It's very densely populated country.
Every year we encounter one or the other calamity, as we speak, 50% of the country is going through a heatwave where more than 50% currently the temperature is more than 40 38 degrees centigrade.
Last year, we had flood.
I'm giving a background because every year we face such challenges, and we'll have to cope up with that.
And especially in a housing finance system like ours, where we have a very old established housing finance system for affordable urban poor, I would say.
Currently, we are running the largest urban housing low income housing program for the world where we have to deliver about close to 8 million houses in the next four years in the urban area.
So national housing finance system can play a very transformative role in building resilience by emitting climate and disaster risk consideration into lending, subsidies and insurance framework, while still protecting affordability for low income household.
For example, risk sharing guarantees like India's credit guarantee fund, where we have just come up with a credit guarantee fund for low income housing, where it covers all the climate and any eventuality in the family, the flooding, which we have come up and that enables the banks to extend loan and encouraging resilient housing upgrade.
Similarly, target subsidies can be tied to a construction standard, what we have done, such as flood resistant material or earthquake safe design, ensuring affordability while promoting safer housing.
Now we have come up with a because India has a very complex, you know, we have mountain on one side, desert on the other side.
Then we have coastal line, which is the two side, plus we have plains, plateaus, so we either encounter cyclone or white flood or, you know, landslide.
So we have started promoting the housing design.
Like every year, we come up with a safe housing design for the urban poor.
Where we give this design to them and we ask them to build the house.
Another strategy, what we have is insurance link finance, where the affordable micro finance bundled with the housing loan protects household from climate shocks without government subsidizing the premium for low income group to prevent exclusion, which covers earthquake, cyc loan and even landslide.
Further in case that flexible mortgage terms such as shorter tens and step of repayment structure, because any such calamity happening is definitely going to impact the income stream of the family for a month, two or three.
So that also in addition to refinancing mechanism also can incentivize like in India.
We have incentive mechanism for green housing and climate resilient housing, where we give subsidy to the extent of 10% of the interest rate prevailing in the country.
Currently, we are lending at, say 7% 7.5% that we give subsidy of 70 basis point if the house is constructed with the material building material, which is, you know, approved by the Green Building and the Resilience Building Society.
And a In fact, expanding access to alternative credit assessment, utility bill and all, what we have seen because approaching this sector, especially in the area in the coastal area on a hilly area, which are especially these areas are more tourist driven area.
So in a particular season when the tourist is there, then the income stream sees a different flow and when there is not there and especially post calamity, we encourage them saving, giving prepayment of the loan.
So that also saves us.
In fact, last year, we have refinanced close to $250 million loans for these subsidies in the climate resilient and the green loans.
Thank you so much and So.
Thank you so much, Sanjai.
I want to actually come to a very interesting point that you mentioned.
I mean, investing in resilient housing, especially for low income people.
I mean, imagine the situation now and maybe this is a good transition to our third panelist, countries that have been facing crises, climate shocks, man made wars that they're recovering from and so on.
We've seen just previously on Lebanon, some of very striking figures out there.
Now the problem is that we can't continue to plan our finance so that it is focused on post disaster rebuilding.
That is just too costly.
It doesn't make even the simplest financial sense, not just economic, social, et cetera.
The damage is much more and it's multiplier.
But investing in pre disaster, especially making sure, just like these measures you mentioned right now in India, investing from now in resilience can save much more multiplier costs if disaster happened.
Maybe 1 minute from you and I would like to ask that question to our colleague from the Asian Development Bank, and I will come to that question, but do you have anything to say there very quickly before that transition? In fact, we have invested.
In fact, we have projected how the sea is moving towards the city in the coastal area.
In fact, five years later, the coastline will be to half a kilometer, 1 kilometer closer to the city or the habitat.
So we have already invested in that.
We are predicting that and we are moving the people living on the coastal line about 2 kilometers behind.
In fact, in one of the southern state of India, we have done it, and in fact, in one of the hilly area.
There also we have faced so much of a landslide.
There also we did some meteorological, the other people who predict and especially.
So then we have invested a lot, in fact, we're working with that.
Thank you so much.
So that's a nice transition now to our third panelist.
So Asian Development Bank, I was actually setting on a session maybe a year ago, and one of your colleagues made a nice statement and that specifically was that disasters are no longer being seen as isolated events.
They're a recurring economic shocks to many countries around the world and it's at a very expedited rate.
My question to you is that how can the Asian Development Bank support cities and governments around the world in shifting from post disaster reconstructive financing to to pre disaster finance? I think this is very critical, especially when we talk about resilience and we talk about resilience, urban development, infrastructure development, and housing.
Over to you.
Thank you very much, Mohammed.
Thank you for the opportunity and inviting ADB to contribute to this very important and critical session today.
Yes, very challenging for everyone here to address resilience issues and identifying the right instruments.
While my other panel members were speaking, I saw that my speaking notes have been shared with Mariana because We are very much aligned and it should be great man think alike.
I think we are echoing each other.
The issue is so critical.
The key shift is to stop treating resilience as an ad hoc as an add on after a disaster and start treating it as a core investment criterion before a project is designed.
Budgeted and finance.
For ADB, this means supporting clients at three levels, upstream policy, risk analytics, project preparation, pipeline development, and capital mobilization.
At the same time, we should be careful not to frame post disaster reconstruction as a purely backward looking exercise.
The principle of build back better is very important here.
Reconstruction should not simply replace damaged housing or infrastructure as they were before.
It should use the recovery moment to introduce stronger urban design standards, better land use decisions, climate resilient infrastructure, safer municipal services, and stronger operation and maintenance systems.
In that sense, Build Back Better is not only about reconstruction, it's a bridge toward disaster resilience because the standard and system introduced during recovery should become the normal way future housing and urban investments are prepared.
ADB can combine several instruments.
Sovereign and sub national lending can finance public goods such as drainage, resilient infrastructure, service land, social housing, and concessional finance and grants can cover the incremental cost of resilience where the benefits are public or long term.
This is especially important because many resilience investments generate large public benefits but do not generate direct project revenue.
This is why resilient housing should be assessed by its life cycle value, not only by the upfront cost of each housing unit.
Guarantees and blended finance can help crowd in private lenders, particularly for retrofits, rental housing, mortgage lending, and housing microfinance.
Policy based lending can support enabling reforms such as risk informed land use rules, building standards, insurance frameworks, and better housing subsidy design.
Contingent disaster financing has a role as well, but it should be complement for disaster investment, not substituted.
The most effective instruments at scale are the ones that link money to rules.
If a national housing subsidy is available only for housing that passes risk screening and meets minimum resilience standards, the subsidy does not only buy a unit, it changes the market.
If a mortgage refinance facility offers better terms for resilient construction or retrofitting, it creates incentives for households and lenders.
If municipalities are required to screen investment plans against hazard maps before receiving financing, resilience becomes part of the normal project cycle.
This is also intermediary and implementation institutions where ADBs role matter in countries where smaller municipalities have limited capacity, an institution that bridges municipalities and IFIS can help translate international standards.
Project preparation, procurement discipline, safeguards, and financing into implementation on the ground.
There are successful examples of that in some of the countries, I so we have a case of Ibank institution in Turkey, which helps to build this bridge.
Finally, resilience must remain affordability conscious.
We cannot simply add cost and expect the poorest households to pay.
The public sector should finance public risk reduction while private finance can support components with reliable repayment streams.
The objective is to reduce lifecycle costs, lower damage, lower energy and water bills, few disruptions, and fast recovery.
The answer is ADB can support this shift by making risk visible early, helping cities prepare bankable pipelines, using concessional and blended finance to cover the resilience gap and embedding risk screening into housing finance and urban investments.
The most effective instruments are those that change incentives before the disaster happens.
Thank you so much.
Really appreciate it.
Very important insights.
Colleagues, we have 5 minutes.
We got cheated by 5 minutes, so I'm stealing them back, right? And I'm going to give you a question, and I want you to think about it for a moment.
Be honest with us.
I turn to you, Mariana.
What is the bigger butternek to financing resilient housing? Just 1 minute.
One big thing that you can think of at a global and one from your perspective as CF.
Why is money not being unlocked? Think about it for a moment.
I'm going to ask the same question to you, Sanjay, right? Why is it so difficult? What is that bottleneck? Why financing resilient housing is not really taking place at scale from your perspective too.
Talked about all these incentives, great, but it's not happening at scale.
Let's just face reality.
Why? Same thing for ATB.
If you want to look at a major one that you can think of worldwide, but also from ADBs perspective.
What would it be? Over to you, Mariana.
Quite a question for just a minute.
I think that first of all, what we have to think about So I think we should have a paradigm shift.
We have to have a pipeline with cities and with governments and with sub national entities.
So our work has to be oriented in such a way that we could produce and we could also support all those we could help all those governments to create these pipelines as an engine that is cities should be engines of projects.
And we should move from financing individual projects to understanding differently and understanding how we should act so that these cities could develop that engine that engine that will generate pipelines and that could receive investments.
And I have a proposal.
I think that this could be a proposal for the UN colleagues.
It'll be very important for us to have easier instruments, easier tools, easy tools to use, and to help these governments so that they can develop these projects because part of the challenge is the difficulty of creating these kinds of projects.
And I think that the UN can help us find those tools.
And I think that we could help apply those in the territories.
Honesty, too.
And this is actually why the partnership right now with UN Habitat, UN DRR, UNDP, and the UN Capital Development Fund is very fruitful if you want to put that sorry.
And UNEP as well.
It's very f because you're able to not only make best use of the United Nations, but we actually also have financing platforms that UN CDF, for example, can provide first loss guarantees.
We can provide concessional finance to come in with the DFIs and FFIs to make these project sustainable or provide the first loss to the DFIs or RFIs directly to absorb that risk.
This is 1.12 taken Sani over to you.
So quickly, I interact quite a tough one question, but just state I and the first, these instruments, in fact, we have come up I'll first talk about from my perspective, what we have done in India.
In fact, we have come up with one or two climate resilient bond and, in fact, in the last year.
But today, given the current interest scenario, unless it is mandated like carbon credit, people would not invest in it, because the differential is only 50 basis point or 100 basis point.
And at the current when they are getting better return, which is 100 basis point more, they will not, but government had mandated to some of the institution to flow the additional surplus resources into a climate resilient bond so it has come And coming from the loss guarantee perspective also, because India mortgages, the loss rate is sub 1%.
It is 0.87.
So that is also not very appealing and not impacting because with 10% extra mortgage receivables, you don't have any chance of guarantee.
In fact, my friend from overseas, they had approached me in the last two years and almost it was surprised at the same level at which we were raising in the country because the hedging cost was pretty high because we have a long term mortgage, which is 15 year mortgage and if you have a resource which is coterminous with that kind of mortgage, then the hygiene costs especially in the unstable developing economy is very high if you compare the dollar loan to a rupee loan, which is my currency.
In fact, there's a lot of awareness happening and government is at least for the country I can talk about, they are mandating to some of the institutions insurance companies will have to invest about 5% of incremental corpus and pension funds will have to invest percent, though the interest rate may not be as high as the market, but they get subsidy and the other cross subsidization from the high yield product.
Thank you so much.
I'm going to just move very quickly to last Yagut over to you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
I think I should be very short here and my short answer would be that the main bottleneck is readiness.
It's not just the money.
Unless without risk informed pipelines and delivery systems, capital cannot move at the scale that we are really needed.
Most of the time the readiness is linked with political will.
And with the capacity and fragmentation in institutions.
So I think all speakers here are echoing each other and we are all aware of the issues, but to act on it, I think what is more critical is to convince the national government to cooperate at all aspects.
Thank you, colleagues very much.
Again, a round of applause, please to our distinguished panelists.
And I want to just leave you with a thought.
I really appreciated that comment from the previous panels about societies, and I'm going to take that now and use it in my speeches.
I'll give you credit for that.
But finance and societies needs to be put at the front line for solution for cities.
Can you make that resource affordable, applicable, bankable, at terms and conditions that makes sense for cities and local governments? Don't forget that because it is a way for us to have that dialogue with the DFIs, to have that dialogue with national governments, to have that dialogue with society so we can actually produce products that make sense? Thank you so much, Cause and Boron.
All that's left for me to do is to invite our panelists to take their leave and to thank you all for participating.
It's really interesting and I'm sorry we didn't have more time to really dig into some of the very important reflections shared with the panels, but thank you all and see you at the next organized event.