 Wonderful. Good morning everyone and welcome. We're so delighted to see you here. This is a very high-level panel for what will be a quite interesting discussion on risk and on building resilience to protect ourselves from what we know are just all of the increasing shocks and uncertainties that we're confronting all around the world, whether we're talking about earthquakes or floods or droughts, heat waves or wildfires, cyclones, hurricanes, tsunamis. I think if we went around the room we could all name at least one in each category that's happened somewhere in the world maybe in the last 12 months. Certainly our technology is more advanced than ever but we still aren't able to predict where and when every shock will occur and so we don't have control over all of the risks but we do have control potentially over the amount of damage that will be incurred and how rapidly our systems will be able to rebound and to restore function. What many of us call the concept of resilience and we'll be talking about that today. There are many reasons why this is becoming even more urgent. The first is really rapid urbanization. We all know the statistics. It's predicted that by 2050 about three quarters of the world's population will be living in cities and many of those are on low-lying coastal regions or on fragile ecologies. By the same year 136 of the world's largest cities could be facing annual flood losses of about a trillion US dollars and those who are most likely to suffer are poor or vulnerable people who simply don't have the resources, economic or other kinds of resources to rebound more quickly and we at the Rockefeller Foundation have been working quite a bit on building urban resilience around the world but we recognize that resilience isn't just a concern for urban areas in rural areas especially in the developing world where three fourths of the people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Entire communities really could thrive or tank on the basis of their vulnerability due to weather events. The World Bank reports that by 2030 there could be 325 million people trapped in poverty and vulnerable because of weather-related events in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. So the extent of this problem and the impact on people is really quite extraordinary and demands global and local attention and all of the sectors are impacted. Certainly the private sector experiences both direct and indirect losses. I was in New York after Superstorm Sandy and chaired the Recovery Commission for Governor Cuomo and it was really astonishing even though New York felt well prepared to see the impact on business, the stock exchange closed down for two days and the like. Besides direct hits industry can also feel the impacts in their supply chains which as we know are global in scope so the Bangkok floods the tsunami in Japan took down global supply chains that affected business all over the world so the business consequences of this are quite profound and then of course the consequences for government that are bearing the cost and the responsibility for rebuilding after each shock and so we've got to start thinking differently and try to do better than just disaster, rebuild, recover, disaster. So how are we building in both our responses and a kind of new narrative that really can enable more effective rebound? Our esteemed panelists are going to help us find the answers to those questions. To introduce them briefly, Baroness Valerie Amos is the Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator for the United Nations and also serves on the forum's Global Agenda Council on Catastrophic Risks. Gregory Domingo, our colleague in the middle is the Secretary of Trade and Industry of the Philippines. He's the advisor to the President of the Philippines on all issues related to trade and investments and industry and is the President's Special Envoy to the World Economic Forum at this meeting. Laurent Salvador Lamoth is the Prime Minister of Haiti. Minister Lamoth served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Worship and has also been a very noted leader in the telecommunications sector as the co-founder and former CEO of the company Global Voice Group. Nahid Nenshi is the Mayor of Calgary, Canada. Mayor Nenshi's leadership is really very well regarded in his first term. He's now in his second term. Has resulted in so many positive changes in Calgary, building better communities and really transforming the way government works. He's the lead author of Building Up, Making Canada City's Magnets for Talent and Engines for Development. Sandra Wu Wen-Hyu is the Chairperson and Chief Executive for Kokusai Kogyo, which works on infrastructure in Japan and they are noted for their excellence in building community-oriented, low-carbon, safe and secure people and environmentally friendly cities that really are able to cope with disasters and they focus on three core strengths, which I think are essential as we have this conversation. Infrastructure, renewable energy and geospatial information technology. So you see we have a lot of global expertise in this room. People who have directly been on the ground confronting these challenges and really can help us to think through this issue. So I'm going to start with you, Valerie, if I may. The UN's a large organization. It has so many different agencies and regional stakeholders, all of whom function in a period after providing emergency relief. Can you talk about the challenges of coordinating the various responders, what mechanisms you have in your place to ensure that there really is a good chain of command, that there's the right communications to make sure that aid is really deployed most effectively? Thanks very much Judith and I'm very pleased to be part of this panel, but before I answer your question specifically, let me just say one general thing, which is very important, because the United Nations, as with many countries and particularly donors, have tended to focus on we've got a humanitarian arm and we've got a development arm. And there are agencies that work on both, but the structures tend to be quite different. So our development colleagues work on a sort of longer-term trajectory, doing more programmatic work and on the humanitarian side we tend to be much more immediate. And what we have been trying to do for the last few years is to say that actually this is not how communities and countries experience disaster. You know, we have this kind of bureaucratic structure but the reality is that that's not how countries function and that essentially is not how communities function. So you don't go to a community that then says well actually I'm in a humanitarian phase right now and in a week or so I'll be in a development phase. People are actually experiencing those things simultaneously. So we've been working very hard through the concept of resilience and trying very hard not to get into defining too clearly what resilience is because it means so many different things to different people and you could end up talking forever but saying we know it when we see it and actually trying to change our practice on the ground. So now to come to what is quite a difficult bit of your question which is how does the coordination work? The coordination can be extremely difficult which is why you have an agency like mine whose job is to work to coordinate, to work with the governments, to work with the regional organizations but also to work with UN colleagues and partner organizations on the ground. A very good example is what happened recently in the Philippines which is it's very clearly a government led effort that we come in behind to support. In some other countries and the Prime Minister will know this even better than I do in the aftermath of 2010 in Haiti because so many structures were destroyed so many crucial people who were essential to the recovery effort and part of government departments either lost their lives or were busy trying to secure their families and communities the international community kind of rushed in and almost took over and I think it led to dissonance in the relationship which we have painstakingly had to rebuild because part of our job is to support government led efforts and it becomes difficult when the government is itself facing challenges and coordination challenges and Haiti is probably the best example recently of a major coordination challenge that it was very difficult to pull together and I think we're working much more closely and more effectively on doing that but when you have a large scale disaster the coordination challenges are significant and you have to invest the resources and the people to do the coordination. So Prime Minister maybe I can turn to you because that is the obvious lead-in to the question of when you really are on the ground you're running the country or you're running the city and disaster strikes and all of this humanitarian aid flows in from all over the world which of course is is very welcome and wonderful and important but how do you integrate the local on the ground organizations that have been in place or the government structures and planning strategies that have been in place with this infusion of aid and goodwill? Well that's a very good question and Haiti has we had our share of natural disasters in 2010 we had of course the devastating earthquake we've had a drought in 2011 we've had the Superstorm Sandy hit Haiti before actually it hit New York and that was also a major a major disaster for us and the location that we have is of course Cyclone Prune. One of the big challenges of course that we've faced is how to prepare better so improving the preparedness improving the coordination and working on a year-round not only waiting for the disaster to strike but also creating a system and we've created the the national risk and disaster management agency and then from there we have the the civil protection agency that you know we're working on it year-round in order to be prepared for a disaster coming and what we've done as well is we put out a new building code that allow people that give people the direction the zoning in order to build better and that's one of the major problems that we had during the earthquake it's not the earthquake itself that was disastrous is the building because you know it was done you know in a in an unstructured way and and the houses were vulnerable right now we're building back better the government is you know the reconstruction has begun all the the new structures are respecting building codes and you know we are investing also in risk mitigation we we are doing riverbank protection to over 50 rivers in Haiti to avoid systematic flooding we've we managed to invest over 30 million dollars into the drainage system into into the into the capital we are unclogging some of the clocks that we've had for years for for some 30 years the ditches were not being drained and we managed to to do that and we're finalizing it in June this year that will help us being more resilient and also the aid coordination is a big is a has been a big challenge because if there is a if there is a disaster one of the biggest problems is how to receive how to absorb some of the the assistance that we're getting and you know with the UN with a lot of NGOs we are doing it year-round we have a disaster management system that we put in place and we have the different agencies present working together and also building a plan basically to to avoid being in an emergency mode when the the disaster strikes so i so i believe the preparedness the organization the right building codes everything that mitigates the risk is what we're focusing on right now so that because we know it's going to happen again to be better prepared. Mayor Nenshi maybe you can pick up at the more local level so this is what a national government is doing how does the city government think about and engage in this kind of preparedness and building and how do you expect to interact both in canada with your state government and your national government as well as whatever foreign actors are are there to help in times of need. Sure you know it may seem strange for me to speak after the prime minister of Haiti about the natural disaster that we faced seven months ago in Calgary but i think it's important for us to remember that natural disaster is not just cataclysmic things that face the developing world and humanitarian crisis but its natural disaster can face all of us it was just seven months ago that we had our devastating flooding in Calgary a river that normally runs at 30 cubic meters per second through the city was running at 700 to 1200 cubic meters per second through the city six billion dollars of damage to private and public infrastructure meaning that flood recovery in my city in my province would in fact be the largest public works project in our history and so i think is important is to understand is that at the local government level there are three phases we have to work through one is immediate response keeping people safe and alive dealing with evacuations figuring out to get people back in their homes and in this case we were very lucky you know we're in a place in the canadian prairies at the foot of the rocky mountains where we don't get cyclones or typhoons an occasional tornado but certainly we're not immune to the forces of nature but we were ready in terms of our response we evacuated a hundred thousand people overnight there was only one casualty within the city limits which i still say is one too many and we were able to get people back into their homes quite quickly so the the response phase i think we were able to manage well the recovery phase in terms of rebuilding that what was lost you know my city lost about a half a billion dollars in public infrastructure roads bridges and so on and that's where the other orders of government become very important because municipal governments anywhere never have the resources in order to be able to manage this so a tripartite a relationship between insurance companies regional governments and federal governments becomes incredibly important and in fact i have to say all three of those in the canadian context have been very helpful the tough part is the title of this session in the third phase resilience we probably have in my city another half a billion dollars of resilience projects that need to be built dams upstream of the city and the biggest one we're looking at is a diversion tunnel which goes underneath an existing built-up city now think about that for a moment as a policymaker half a billion dollars how much public transit could i build for half a billion dollars i have a 23 billion dollar infrastructure deficit on things that will be needed every day and yet i have to go to citizens and say i need to spend your money this money on something that might never ever be used and if you just do the math to spend a half a billion dollars to prevent a one in 100 chance of five billion dollars in damage well you'd never do that you just spend the damage except for two things is it one in one billion or one in 100 years i should say and is it five billion dollars and what is the human cost of that damage so at this point seven months after the disaster it's easy for me to make the case to provincial and federal governments that this money has to be spent if we don't do it now a year from now that case will be very difficult so sandra you run a company that's that's building some of this infrastructure is there a way to show mayors and presidents and prime ministers that that investment also helps them in the short term that it isn't just an investment against long-term disaster but actually can make them function more effectively in their terms of office for this question because i have to say that doing business in japan and living in japan basically we are living along with the natural disaster so i think there is no other country probably span or pay such a huge attention to build themselves resilient to the natural disaster so i would say maybe maybe a lot of people will criticize that japan because they was hard economically in the past decades so those budgets yes it did go down quite a quite an amount but i would say that japanese no matter its government or the private sector we never neglect to to on those are hot infrastructure so since that 1995 Kobe earthquake as a huge you see all those from the tv from the media and after that those building cold and those earthquake proof uh improvement all adopted so i can say that or maybe you already see it from the tv they're very limited damaged during that the 311 earthquake but all the thing is because that tsunami so i would like to say that this day when we're doing those when we are thinking about those disaster risk reduction yes we still both the public and private sector we still pay i mean invest in the hot infrastructure no matter it's building our own manufacturer or the seawall but we change the my side and then all those new policy have been revised now we understand that especially after this tsunami we cannot protect ourselves 100 but we can prevent and reduce the impact as much as we can so and that is the way that is not only the hot infrastructure but we combine the hot infrastructure and the soft infrastructure softer measurement together they can help us uh to i think the most important thing is save people's life rather than protect the status quo so this is a very important uh mindset changed even though people think that uh japan is a very well-prepared country but all the dr our disaster risk reduction mindset have changed due to this 311 and i would like to emphasize about this soft infrastructure and the measurement i think this is something that we can share i mean from japan can share with the word yes it has after the 1995 coal bay there is like an early warning system phone based or those manual operation and drill evacuation practice we have been done and practice every year but now it's it's more we need to have a more innovation about let's say the auto manufacturer utilizing those GIS GPS and then can provide those real-time evacuation option and also can active and accelerate those rescue active which is this i think is very important and then for not just only those those infrastructure but also the practice we will help we will work together with the government and even the community and how to practice this is just not rely on the hot infrastructure but how to you know run when you hear any when the tsunami come where earthquake come you have to follow where to run or what to do so this is something is very important i i read in the recovery report after the tsunami that your commission did that 10 times more girls or women drowned than men in the tsunami because girls in japan didn't learn how to swim no no so at least that was their assertion so are you working on the soft soft part of the responses yes yes that's one thing that's i think i will emphasize that importance of the data collection if we want to review or you want to do any prevention you need to collect all the data because sometime the disaster comes maybe once 100 years only 100 years they come once but if you collect all the data you can immediately compare the data before and after and you can immediately immediately do all those if you do keep the those monitoring and evaluating then you know how to do the response rescue and then you know how to learn from your lesson to do your reconstruction and prepare for the future and last one thing i want to emphasize very important is it's not just so only the evacuation is how to prepare ourselves to be resilient to the future possible risk so that is a continuity plan so from the national continuity plan community continuity plan your building and also our company we are from the business society so it was been it has been uh encouraged to for the private sector to adopt the business continuity plan but this one one i say it really accelerates the business society to emphasize and really invest on this continuity plan and this continuity plan we're not just only prepare ourselves to be resilient i think it's very important is can help the country and and the whole i mean the business society to reduce its social economic laws thank you mr. Domingo we all have images still of typhoon hyan and the horrific human cost and loss of lives but for a moment just to continue since you're the secretary of trade and industry on the business sector and the impact of these kinds of devastating events on business and the economy of the country can first of all can you share with us the kind of business recovery that's going on and what the mechanisms are that you're putting in place to really think about that systematically yes well first let me just put it in perspective this typhoon hyan is an event that i've never seen in my lifetime so the philippines i would say is quite resilient in terms of calamities because we're used to it and so i think in terms of a typhoon we're probably geared up for a one in a 50 year event but this particular one was one in one in a hundred year type of event so they say but a lot of these ones in a hundred year events are occurring globally so frequently that maybe we have a new normal so we don't know now in terms of the the business disruption or economic impact nationally it's actually very little because it hit a part of the country which was actually one of the poorest parts of the country and which there is very little industrial activity it's primarily agricultural and fishing and some handicraft but in terms of the local economy the local economy was devastated because what happened after typhoon hyan is the electricity was cut the water was cut the roads were totally impossible not the single road was possible the port the seaport was closed because the equipment was destroyed the airport was closed and so all of these things had to be worked on and all the businesses were closed 100 not a single one was left operating cell sites were all down all the trees were down so in terms of the impact on the local economy very big impact so now the government is doing a lot of efforts now to bring business back to its feet of course it starts with financing assistance so all the agencies of government that are helping especially in the sms are have opened the windows of financing there's also government also has been giving money to to those who were affected starting with support for reconstruction of their homes to to support for for two things like cash for work programs so those because we have a lot of because it was a very poor area there were a lot of people who were just doing small types of businesses selling foods retail small retail operations and so as a replacement for that temporary loss of income the government and actually a lot of aid agencies NGOs were also doing the same thing doing cash for work programs so you do some work clear the roads do this help rebuild the house then they pay your money so but we're also launching a series of additional assistance where we're now going to be provide we're now waiting for approval of a proposal for example we're in what we call merchant seeding program where we we train people to sell certain staff how to do accounting and then we provide them with an initial batch of things to sell and then when they're successful they come back and then we give them additional merchandise for free no no no payment so that can get the ball rolling you know the global data showed that 25 percent of SMEs globally never reopen after a disaster like this and here we're talking about job creation and unemployment and the like when you think that a quarter of the economy goes down every year somewhere in terms of these disasters it's yet another huge reason why we've got to think about this in a in a completely different way when Baroness Emma started she talked about the development aid as one bucket and the humanitarian aid as another and each agency responsible for their own piece of this again a chilling statistic for three dollars of every development aid given a dollar is lost to these kinds of crises you now prime minister get money in in a variety of ways whether it's post emergency relief or development aid or private investment which you've been amazing and in really galvanizing for for your country how do you think about orchestrating the financing in a way are you agnostic about the dollars are you the sort of leverage point for how public private partnerships develop how are you thinking about all of these buckets of money i know it's not enough but in using them in some way that really provides some kind of cat a little leverage well one of the i mean one of the key areas of course was when we came in was a gigantic task of rebuilding a country with very little resources most of the the aid that came to Haiti came as humanitarian emergency relief and that was very necessary at the time and you know we had four thousand olympic pools worth of rubbles for example that we had to remove we had a situation where you know all 1.5 million people or 50 percent of the capital's inhabitants were left homeless and were living in tents on the streets and so we needed to very quickly find financing in order to to relocate them so we had a program called 166 that we put together with NGOs with with international development agencies and with the government with the government leadership to relocate the people into the original neighborhoods fixing their homes and providing them a rent subsidy for a year and and a stipend to also open a micro a micro enterprise in order for them to to get by and maybe open a small a small shop selling you know basic groceries for the community and that has been one of the most successful projects that this government has had since we were since we came in because it showed that the the aid mechanism and the coordination when when when then well if it's government led of course can produce positive results and this has been an extraordinary program that has worked very well in helping and helping people now this of course goes to the human impact the infrastructure impact we lost a port we lost an airport we lost over 40 percent of housing were were destroyed so so the infrastructure impact was great how did we move from that to where we are today Haiti has had of course the the goodwill of the international community so we have worked with many agencies trying to develop a better coordination package which we have done called the kayak which is an aid mechanism that that identifies the need areas and that that request donors to focus on those areas and many of them have done it you know have focused on different areas so for example we have some donor that are focusing on on education we have clusters that are focusing on infrastructure on on health and that has that has worked pretty well you know if you look at the health statistics the health indicators they're all in green right now and and of course you know it's it's very challenging because in Haiti everything is a challenge on on a daily it's development on a shoestring basically and that's never easy so um and one of the areas that we're focusing on as we're talking about financing and that's the that that's a paradox is when the country was hit by this but by the earthquake we had 13 billion dollars worth of damage both infrastructure um and and everything was destroyed so we needed funds to to rebuild we got the funds in emergency that was fine now we need to to go into nation building and that's where we're having you know challenges because we had a debt cancellation we had 1.2 billion dollars of debt that was cancelled by by the international institutions but also it put Haiti in a in a category seven where we're not able to to lend so we cannot go into the capital markets and what do we do because we have the we have the country to rebuild we're not getting quick enough disbursement on the on the nation building side we did on the on the humanitarian relief we don't have access to to capital markets to to borrow what do we do and and and you know what i'm going to say here is going to sound different but this is the reality we have to rely heavily on on an agreement that Haiti has with the government of Venezuela where that government provides us with discounted oil um 60 basically we purchase oil from them they send us a boatload every month we pay we pay 40 percent of the invoice with a three-month grace period and we in 60 percent of the amount goes into a development account that that's used for development projects so right now from 2008 till now it amounted to about 1.3 billion dollars and that 1.3 the government it's it goes into budget support in our in our budget and every every every year and that's what we used last year we used 462 million dollars of that fund in order to rebuild the country after sending and this is basically the only source of of financing that the government has in order to to finance its its infrastructure projects and this has been something that it's it's you know it's God sent for us as we are looking for private investment private you know foreign direct investment is up 25 percent but that's 220 million dollars for the year whereas you know the the the the Venezuelan assistance amounts for close to 25 million dollars per month to give you an idea of how much impact that it does and how much good that it's done to Haiti and it's it's kept up it's kept the government afloat and and and being able to finance our infrastructure and if you come today you will see that you know we are rebuilding over 700 kilometers of roads we have we're doing 10 hurricane shelters for example we're investing into the drainage system you know the country you know we're rebuilding seven ministries 42 of them were knocked down after the earthquake five new airports the airport of Port-au-Prince has been renovated we're doing a new airport in Cap-Haitien one in the south and then two in the southeast we're rebuilding the port facility so the country is moving forward and that's you know that's not through creative financing because it's none you know we're not getting any more debt Sandra mentioned soft infrastructure so are you also replanting trees and fortifying the coastline with against coastal erosion and all of the more soft infrastructure kinds of we are doing so of course you know we're trying to do a lot with little resources and that's uh that's been also a very big challenge is is trying to do a lot with little we have to prioritize where and how we do it so so the country has a big deforestation 98.5 percent of the country is is deforested it right now so we're doing different projects you know we have one going with professor Eunus and Richard Branson to reforest 10 000 haters and but that's that's just you know beginning as to what what needs to be done on the shoestring and i'd like to point that out because you know we have to maximize the use of every dollar in order to make sure that it goes to where it's supposed to go and and where it's most needed and that's been also a big challenge into the into the planning phase of the development approach Hillary don't answer this if it's an unfair question but if you've you've seen so much of of all of this all over the world if you had a magic wand and you could reorganize the financing mechanisms within development and humanitarian aid what kind of structure would really enable both capacity building for the long term as well as this more immediate responding when the disaster hits uh well i think there is a huge gap in terms of uh how you know what are the incentives to help local government national government regional government to invest in preparedness uh it's a really difficult challenge uh to make a decision uh we heard about it at the local level in terms of uh Calgary to be able to sell to your citizens that you are investing now for something that may happen in the future and one of the things that really concerns me is that uh we've seen a couple of examples uh recently where uh citizens have been prepared very well prepared for something that might happen and then when it doesn't happen they sort of turn around and say to their their governments well that was a kind of waste of time really you you sort of marched us up a hill and then you had to march us down again so how do you how do you get the investment in preparedness and the World Bank have done some very good work which you know shows that you know we are investing sense in preparedness and lots of dollars in response so we have to really change this model uh the second thing that um I think we have to do is to look at ways in which we can also invest very locally um so it's about communities I mean the communities are the first responders so it's about the humanities it's both in terms of culture change uh as well as being about the local government structures so it's this mix of the soft and the hard it's both about infrastructure but it's also about culture um so I would change the financing mechanisms uh I would give a lot more support to the local uh and really make the international the thing that comes in behind last I mean we should be the last thing that comes in and I think the investment as well in the public private is absolutely crucial we saw recently in the Philippines response a huge private sector uh engagement in that how do we best coordinate that with what the government itself is doing as well as the broader international response maybe I can turn to the mayor as we talk again about the local level and really the the kinds of demands being made of mayors all over the world we had many mayors invited to the forum this year and uh had fantastic conversations not only about risk and and resilience but about unemployment and and many of them made the point that the mayor is ground zero um in many places around the world and and how do you really you talked about a long term project but there must also be some shorter term projects that both build resilience and capacity for emergency and at the same time serve your citizens we are um promoting the development of bus rapid transit for example because we know that it's great for transportation in the good times and it's phenomenal for transportation in the bad times and so aren't there investments like that across the various sectors locally that could be a win-win wow there's about five questions in there and I'll try and I'll try and hit them so number one yes of course as we rebuild as opposed to the things that are pure resilience of course we're going to rebuild in a way that is thoughtful that mitigates against future disaster and damage I want to highlight a couple of things I think and one is we've talked a lot about larger projects in terms of recovery and resilience and the role of governments and I and I want to make sure we don't miss one thing which is the role of individuals and the remarkable capacity that we have as human beings both to be resilient but also to help our neighbors and that's something that we saw very much uh in in our situation that people were really able to come out and do great things you know one simple example is we needed to inspect homes before we could get people back into them and that would have taken a long time with 40,000 homes and what we were able to do is give people simple checklists you may re-enter your home but go to the community center first pick up some gloves and some boots if there's water on the ground leading up to your front door don't go in if there's water in your basement above the bottom of the electrical outlet go back to the to the community center so in short overnight we created 35,000 building inspectors and we were able to get people back into their homes much much more quickly than we would have been able to do otherwise and when we think about these small resilience projects we have to remember part of that is people's own little projects on their own when you're rebuilding your home move the fuse blocks out of the basement you know simple things like that that actually make a huge difference and government policy can really help make that work in our in our case our provincial government has said if you apply for disaster relief we will give you extra funding that will be specifically for resilience on your individual property but you must do it in order to be eligible for future funding these things i think are smart common-sense situations to try and decentralize the work that's done i do want to say something about your point about mayors being ground zero and i know the prime minister and others would agree with this but this is a significant leadership challenge for those of us in public service and certainly we enter public service in order to serve and i never ever want to go through what we went through this year again but at the same time it does give us lessons in terms of public leadership that i think are helpful and we made two decisions at the beginning which i later learned are not common decisions and disasters but they were very quickly done at the beginning and number one was if we knew anything the public needed to know the same thing unless there was a compelling public safety reason to hold back information the information had to flow even if it was bad news and there never was a public safety reason to hold back the information so we revealed everything and the second was to put me this funny face front and center and the reason for that was not because i really love doing press conferences or briefings or because i'm a subject matter expert the reason for that was because citizens knew who i was and when extremely difficult messages are being delivered when people need reassurance when they need a sense of hope that things are going to be better it's very difficult for the director of emergency management who they've never seen before to be able to deliver that message and i think as politicians and public servants it's very very important not for the photo op view in the jacket with the paddles or whatever but really important because that trust has already been built with the community to make sure that as these messages are being delivered they're being delivered by people whom the citizens have faith in and and it's true that mayors are ground zero people really identify with their mayors and and my message to my colleagues in this job is that it's very important for us to be out front in these things i think that's critical i want to emphasize in a different way your first point and then Valerie jump in um tom freden who is the head of the centers for disease control in the u.s. recently spoke and he said his experience in all of the pandemics and he was also the health commissioner in new york city before was be honest be transparent give the citizens the data tell them the information even if it's bad news that in the end that was one of the most important lessons that he learned in recovery whether it was a health issue or a natural disaster of one sort and often our public officials are loath to do that they feel that it makes the public nervous they don't have all the answers yet and yet people are arguing those who are in these important positions that it's really the opposite i wanted to agree 100 with the communication point but i wanted if i may to to put a question to the minister from the philippines which relates to the points that have been made about the importance of building back better uh because i think the prime minister alluded to some of the challenges of building back better in a difficult and challenging environment which is the case in port-de-prince and is very much the case in the philippines uh post typhoon hayan which is not just about hayan but the fact that this is a country which is very disaster prone and actually um and minister i hope i'm not putting you uh uh in too much of a difficult position by asking you this but if you look at some of the uh research that the government itself has done with respect to where you relocate people to that actually the government doesn't necessarily have as wide a range of choices as it would like to have given that the philippines is essentially a chain of islands many of them quite small so relocating uh people from what we would sometimes think of as moving them away from uh a disaster prone area isn't as easy to do in a country like the philippines as it might be somewhere else and i just wondered what challenges that created for the government in terms of these issues around building that better yeah well typhoon hayan has really made made the philippine government rethink everything when it comes to disaster management and resiliency issues so we're definitely gonna redraft the disaster response manual we are now doing thousands of simulations uh and the entire philippines to see which areas are disaster prone whether it be with storm surges or earthquake areas and then appropriate policies will be done but right now they're already determining at least in the immediately affected areas that no build zones for example we will be reviewing building codes and coming up with new ones and they may not be applicable to the entire country but it might the building codes may be different for depending on the type of rating you get in terms of the disaster risk and the for example the immediate decision in those areas was already 40 meters back that nobody can build on those that were swamped with the storm surge of 47 meter water so they will not be allowed to rebuild within 40 meters of the shore but that's still being that's still conditional it's being implemented now but that could still be subject to change depending on the results of the simulations not not the entire philippines is disaster prone it's mostly the eastern part because that's where all the storms come from and as so as a result of this everything will be overhauled the I just wanted to make another point because you you mentioned earlier about the accountability of the aid that's given one the aid comes in in two forms one is in in kind this could be tents this could be food this could be in the forms of shifts aircraft that are used in the disaster response or ferrying goods and they come in also in the form of cash now in terms of kind those are executed basically by the countries that donate them for example the aircrafts the ships a lot of the food is distributed directly as well by by the foreign aid agencies and by the countries that donate them but we account for that in fact the philippines as part of its governance effort and transparency came up with a website I just can't recall the website itself but I can give you that later wherein they show all the donations to the philippine government in cash and in kind in terms of pledges in terms of the what how much was actually received and where it went so we have that website available to anyone that's great so second in terms of cash the philippine government of all the announced donations the philippine government receives less than 10 percent of cash because especially let's say if multinational announces that it's donating two million dollars five million dollars ten million dollars most multinationals are not allowed to donate to the government so they announce it as a donation to the philippines but it actually goes to red cross it goes to world food program it goes to save the children so but let's say the 10 the 5 to 10 percent that we receive it's all accounted for in the website now yeah good that's great listen I just want to make the accountability please that we also run something called a financial tracking service which does exactly the same thing for all the countries around the world so all that donors have to do and it's for in kind and cash contributions is to just let us know basically that this contribution has been made to a country and that is tracked as well because very often a lot of contributions are made by you know individuals by companies in kind which nobody knows about but it's there so we we have something similar for all of the countries crucial I want to make one point and then Sandra I'm going to turn to you and then I will open it to the audience we and this is an important devil's advocate point Superstorm Sandy followed a completely different track than any hurricane that had gone up the northeast for the last 45 years and so we have learned in New York not to say anymore we think this area is hurricane prone and we think that area is not hurricane prone the idea of this is really to say to yourself there's a degree of risk so clearly you're but there's so much uncertainty now about the course of some of these shocks and storms that a broader language around preparedness may be the new narrative of the 21st century so we're hearing that in a lot of these conversations really for the first time we can't prepare for everything and the last storm isn't or the last 20 years of storm may not be the best predictor of where and what the next the next shock will be Sandra the prime minister has talked so much in Japan about investment now in infrastructure as one of the mechanisms for stimulating the economy and continuing to move it into a different kind of growth pattern is the conversation there linked though to resilient infrastructure to risk capacity or are they still separate conversations and and how do you see it definitely those public investment is definitely include include those investment no matter it's infrastructure hard or soft or to to to address the future or further possible risk but before i answer you that because talk heard about lots of those of finance and mayors say i want to give you something that really can reference because i do believe that the the community is very important and during those how to maintain and how to make the community resilient is very important during those natural disaster so to those individual very important equally the SMB or the the corporate for the business sector actually they are they you know all those stakeholders either they are our clients our employee or they are our contractor so if our business sector we can really make our self resilient and continue it and make our self can sustainable when the disaster happened actually there's really helpful to the community and and one case i can give you a reference in japan is the the investment bank of japan they're encouraged the private sector to have their own business continuity plan and they will give the rating if you have the bcp then the ibj will provide you a premium loan for the loan which is helpful and really can encourage that and not only that we are the business company the business sector we work very closely with the local government and one form in japan is we call it uh emergency agreement and it's so it's well uh well known as the bosaikyo de in this drm society so this is everything because it's very difficult to get those coordination and communication uh after the disaster happened so you have to really put everything in place before the disaster happened and this is kind of like a prevention so those agreement you can't be put with the government central government and local government and also the local government with the private sector so you see uh in 311 there's no panic in japan because everything we understand is all arranged there so they can cover it like a row uh the recovery all those construction so you see all those uh probably people got attention by the tsunami but all those row railway airport they got recovered and restored within one week or at most two weeks because everything is well prepared but we also learn from this uh this 311 so many things we have to improve uh more those facility and services because not only those uh place on on the people on the site but also people they are far from those earthquake disaster uh the place the people in tokyo just cannot go home so how we can uh that the government decided to make those agreement with the shopping mall with those big building if they cannot go home those shopping mall at the building they will put those generator blanket full water there and make them safe staying at those building so this is this kind of lot of the agreements being uh implemented so we have five minutes left what i'm going to do is ask for three questions in a row not speeches but questions and then allow each of our panelists a minute for a response sir you all been saying the sector where i belong to which is a construction we can play a major role in natural disasters so but we have to work very close with local governments otherwise it won't be possible so my question is i would like to hear some of your comments how could we because how do you get involved with local people the uh with local uh contractors and investors we have done that in Mexico but i would like to hear some other comments thank you other questions yes hi i'm michelle walker with the world policy institute in new york uh you've talked about some of the the warning systems that the roadmaps for what to do when there's a storm coming but in every case you have people who don't want to do it the people in new york who didn't evacuate for for superstorm stand sandy because Irene was a total disappointment the year before people in all of your countries who so question who won't do it how do you how do you handle those people how do you change that behavior for the better and the last question take the role of natural infrastructure into consideration in preparedness all right any of the questions that you want to answer in one minute or less i'll start with you and just go down the road gallery um i'll take the culture shift uh question and i think that um you have to change behavior over time uh and you know it's not going to happen immediately i think that the culture shift has to be two way uh one is that people have to understand that uh it is better to be prepared and for something not to happen than uh to be uh not to be prepared and something does happen and this is a major culture shift but i think at the same time we have to accept that people are individual um it was very interesting when i went to the Philippines and one of the islands i went to the mayor actually threatened to lock people up if they didn't evacuate and he did actually lock up one or two people it's an extreme uh approach to take and i think in the united states it wouldn't work but it it worked in that particular instance there and answer to any of the questions i'm gonna no i'm gonna go down the row yes we have to be engaged with the private sector particularly the construction industries to help us come up with new codes and better codes and to build in resilience in what we do number two give people really practical things that they can do charge your devices fill your bathtub things like that and and help them understand and and be human about it use a mix of don't scare people but use a mix of facts come straightforward sometimes cajoling and teasing people if you want to really have some fun google nenshi darwin law and you'll see what i said to people who wanted to go out on the river during the flooding which is basically that i wasn't allowed to just let them invoke the darwin law and uh and it was selfish to require the first responders to do that but i think being human in that way and helping really translate things to people's individual lives and what you need to do really helped us with a lot of that of people actually abiding by what needed to do and yes of course the natural infrastructure is important one of the key provisions with our flood was the simple fact that there's been so much development upstream of calgary and the rocky mountains that change the permeability of the ground concrete didn't absorb the water it wouldn't have any way because of flash storms but it certainly made it worse and so to think about things like permeability tree cover natural enhancement of river banks incredibly important yeah uh well dealing with people sometimes in the philippines case the terminology could have made a big difference and there was a debate about this because people didn't understand what the storm surge is if they had said tsunami you didn't even have to arrest them because before you could finish your sentence they would have been gone out of there um and then and uh so oh by the way in that on uh just a additional comment that may wrote uh threatened to arrest people was going to arrest them on attempted suicide of course there's no such thing but on the contractors it was very easy in the philippines case because there was one central agency assigned to do all the rebuilding which is the department of public works and highways quick answer i think um one thing is very important is the mindset and how we think about it be positive because i do believe that uh building resilience to the natural disaster cannot is not a standalone issue it helps protect saving life and it also helps to reduce the impact from the climate change and the development goals sustainable development goals cannot be achieved if we don't build ourselves uh resilient to those natural disaster so i see japan is we are taking a not a defense approach but a more offensive approach to is a active attempt to to to address the future and the further risk and for us i think all the citizen and all the business sector together with a public sector and all the members here in our wf members we think about that if we should take it as inter-role issues and we work along we work together and to make sure that we are resilient and to make to build build ourselves and build the whole world even better thank you and mr mr prime minister the last word um prevention and communication with the people in in Haiti we had the earthquake and then we had the superstorm sunday so we had a situation where we needed to evacuate people that were actually affected by the earthquake living in in in refugee camps and not wanting to leave the refugee camps when superstorm sunday was going to hit so and we and we're talking about close to 10 000 people that were living in in that camp and it was in a flood area so the president and myself had to go before because you know there was a strong chance that this was going to be flooded and the people would be affected so we had to go personally and and convince them talking to the leaders to to relocate into nearby schools and and that in itself was not a solution so but it helped in that particular case save lives so so it's not only in new york that people don't want to leave you know the uh their places in in that instance they didn't want to leave an idp camp and you know of course with communication constant reinforcement of showing what could happen to them you know being on the radio being with local uh local leaders you know and and and driving home the message you know is key to to saving lives and and being more resilient that that's that's certainly what we're using in this constant communication at the grassroot level please join me in thanking our incredible panel