 Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to speak with you all. I had a quick look at the participants list and I recognized some of the names there from my various travels. So it's great to be amongst friends and new colleagues. So this is the presentation that I put together for the safer cities session. So I suppose I wanted to begin with this. It's quite a familiar diagram to many of us. It's from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that was produced roughly 15 years ago. And it goes on to describe a variety of ecosystem services that we can expect from our natural environments, supporting services, provisioning services, cultural services, regulating services, so on and so forth. Now, many of us appreciate that our urban forests will directly contribute to safer cities, in particular the regulating and provisioning services, things like clean water, cooler temperatures, flooding control, carbon sequestration and storage, clean air, these are all things that make our cities safer and are a direct contribution by our urban forests to, I guess, making cities safer for our benefit. Now, I'm not specifically gonna speak about any of these. I think we've already heard a number of previous speakers speak very well on these topics and I believe we're gonna hear a little bit more about that from some of the other speakers as well. So I think we're gonna hear enough about these topics. Instead, I wanted to speak to you today about a topic that doesn't affect our day-to-day life, like so many of these other ecosystem services. When I was asked to speak about safer cities, I suppose I considered my own perspective, my own experiences. And one of the experiences that really stands out in my own mind is my experience with the 2010, 2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence here in Christchurch, New Zealand. Now, I imagine many of us on this call have on this webinar have experienced earthquakes in our own countries. The Asia Pacific region has numerous earthquakes every day, every month, every year. Countries like Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Pacific Islands and New Zealand have frequent earthquakes. Even here in Christchurch just two hours ago, I felt an earthquake at the very beginning of this webinar session. So earthquakes are not uncommon by any stretch of the imagination. Now, when the first earthquake struck, this is, by the way, this is an image that was captured at the exact moment of the earthquake struck, which is quite a fortuitous image to be captured because it shows the city in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Now, the earthquakes by sort of global standards were not overly devastating, certainly not in terms of the toll to human life. There was only something like 186, maybe 187 lives lost. And I say only because of course I appreciate that that's still a lot of people that lost their lives. It's an absolute misfortune. But by global standards, that's relatively few lives lost for an event of this magnitude. Now, when I say magnitude, the reason I bring that up, I guess, is because the ground accelerations that were felt during these earthquakes were amongst the highest ground accelerations ever measured. They were 2.2 times the acceleration of gravity. And again, at the time of the February 2011 earthquake that we had here in our city, it was the highest measured ground acceleration that had ever occurred. That was shortly lived because as we all know, the absolutely devastating earthquakes that happened in Japan a short time later, broke those records. Now, the devastation that was wrought on Christchurch, again, lives lost billions of dollars of infrastructure damage, these were all great challenges, but it could have been much, much worse had it not been for the urban forest. So I just wanted to walk you through a few slides and images as well as some of the anecdotes that I experienced to sort of share with you some of the values that we got from our urban forest during the earthquakes themselves and again, sort of in the short aftermath. As you can imagine for a city like Christchurch, which is, it's a coastal city. It's a city that's fringed by hills made of volcanic rock. The city during the earthquakes themselves experienced many landslides, many rockfall events. So you can see parts of the city up in the image to the top right. That's just a small fraction of the city, but I'm just trying to showcase there the sort of hilly nature of the city. Now, in all of those hilly areas, again, there was large volumes of landslide rockfalls that occurred. And we were fortunate because in many areas, the trees that comprise the urban forest, specifically the trees that were planted on those hills, had large spreading root systems that were able to sort of hold the soil together and minimize the mass movement erosion that occurred from soil slips. So where soil slips did occur, they were relatively small compared to what they could have been had trees not been present in those areas. The other big impact was the rockfalls and you can see the main image there is a very large rock in the middle of somebody's house. That was a rock that basically came crashing down from one of the hillsides and into somebody's home there. I don't know whether it's the Kiwi sense of humor, but they nicknamed the rock rocky and it was actually sold for $60,000 in all the money donated to earthquake relief charities. So it's kind of a nice story from a relatively devastating event. Now, that's an example of what can happen in the absence of trees protecting homes. But fortunately, there were large areas of homes that were protected by protection forests, shelter belts. The protection forest themselves were used in conjunction with rockfall fences. So basically fences that are specifically engineered to prevent rockfall from damaging people and property downhill. But what we found here was that the trees actually provided far greater benefit to the protection of people and property than did the rockfall fences. You can see images like this one, for example. This is a shelter belt that's roughly 40 meters wide. It's comprised of pine and cypress trees and this shelter belt is rockfall protection forest. It was uphill of a relatively wealthy development in the hills and you can see the size of those boulders that were stopped by those trees. What's particularly interesting about this particular shelter belt is you can see here's another image of it. You can see the damage on some of those trees from where the boulders actually were bouncing down the hill and sort of hit those trees stopping the boulders in their course. And some of those marks on trees are a good five or six meters above the ground. So when these rockfall events were occurring as a consequence of the earthquake, the boulders were rolling down the hill sort of bouncing along and often they just clear. They simply hopped over the rockfall protection fences that again were specifically designed to prevent that from happening. But it just shows that the size of these shelter belts, not only the depth of them or the diameter of them but the height of these individual trees really played a considerable role in minimizing the damage that happened downhill. Now another area of interest, another area where trees played an absolutely critical role in minimizing the damage and distress that occurred from the earthquakes was the use of green spaces by emergency surfaces. So you can imagine or I'll just ask you to imagine sort of a normal workday, you're at work in whatever city it is you happen to be listening from the earthquake occurs. The first thing that you do when that happens, if you've ever experienced an earthquake is you shelter sort of in place, you sort of stop and wait for the shaking to subside. But once it does, you tend to try to get outside and find a little bit of shelter away from tall objects, tall buildings. In Christchurch, we had two buildings that collapsed, two tall buildings that collapsed. And basically people tried to escape their buildings and find a place to take shelter away from the unreinforced masonry and other falling objects that were causing so much damage and death. And they found that shelter. People found workers, citizens, people who were living in the downtown areas found that shelter along with blankets, along with food, along with sanitation in the urban parks within the city center. So you can see some people taking shelter in the bottom left image there with a person in a high vis vest sort of tending to their needs. In the, you know, that picture was taken sort of an hour after the earthquakes that had occurred and people were congregating in large numbers in these small urban parks because they felt safe in the absence of large buildings surrounding them. Now, in addition to that, that service, all of the emergency services, so fire, police, ambulance workers, the urban search and rescue teams that were basically in charge of going into damaged buildings to try to find survivors, those people all needed places to congregate during their rescue efforts. And of course, you can imagine a city crumbling around you. The last place you want to be is standing at the base of buildings as more and more and more after shocks occur. So they sought, I guess, isolation from the adjacent unstable buildings in again, small urban parks in the city center. So you can see in the top right image, this is a small park called Latimer Square. It's right in the city center. You can see lots of the damaged buildings in the foreground as well. And you can see the tents set up for the urban search and rescue teams. And basically that site, Latimer Square, acted as the command center for the urban search and rescue teams as well as the other emergency services that allowed them to undertake emergency triage operations as well as to work safely and even to rest in between their different work shifts. So a really critical role played there by urban green spaces, providing that safe space for emergency workers during an extreme event like this. I do have to ask you to speak faster. Sure, Thane, no problem at all. I've got one slide left. So the last thing that I want to highlight is the importance of urban green spaces for emergency housing following something like an earthquake. So numerous people lost their homes in the earthquakes like the home in the center of that image right there. And as a consequence of that, they needed places to stay. So in the short term, in the days or weeks after the aftermath, numerous Kiwis, myself included, camped out in our local parks using tents because we didn't feel safe going back to our homes that were quite unstable. Now, years after the earthquakes, I'm talking seven, eight years after the earthquakes, people were still living in purpose-built temporary accommodation like this. So this used to be just a regular urban park. There was no buildings there whatsoever. They quickly built these buildings to provide people with a place to live while their homes were getting rebuilt or repaired because anybody who's ever experienced an earthquake in their own home countries possibly understands that the insurance process is very lengthy. And this final point that I'll make here is related to this. This is the importance of sort of the equitable distribution or the spatial distribution of parks. I was really quite taken by the previous presenters, a description of Lomfini Park in Bangkok. I thought it was an absolutely beautiful park and we have an equivalent park here called Hagley Park and it's in the center of that image. It's the large urban park in the center. But you notice all the other little green open spaces and parks sort of dotted around the city. Those are really critical for providing, again, places for people to take shelter or places for people to go for emergency housing in the aftermath of an earthquake. With that, I will wrap it up and thank you for your time. And I'm happy to answer any questions once the presentations are completed.