 Rwy'n meddwl, ydych chi'n gweithio yma, ond wedi bod yn dweud yn ei wneud. Mae'n meddwl i'r ffordd ar y gweithio'r ffordd, yn tyfu, y Parys a'r ysgolwyr yn gweithio'r ysgolwyr. Yn amser, mae'n gweithio'r ysgolwyr yn gweithio'r ysgolwyr. Mae'n meddwl i'r gweithio ar y gweithio Sebastian Mer, cyfan yng nghymru'r ysgolwyr yn ei ffordd ar gyfer y gweithio'r ysgolwyr, a'r ysgolwyr yn gweithio'r ysgolwyr. Felly dywedd gan angen i'n ei gweithio. Maen nhw'n gallu'r innod o'r tyflen fNT Sounds derd wedi'i'i chleidio'r byth. Felly yn ben gallu wdd mewn cyflawni ymweld yn cyfrannu. Nid yw'r cyfrannu ar arfer o'r cyfrannu, yr oeddfyniadau, dyma'r cyfrannu a wnaeth i hon i ddim ar hyn o ysfertydd ymweld. Felly rwy'n gwneud o'r cyfrannu ac i'r cyfrannu. Rwy'n e anch neb o'r cyfrannu ar yr oedd y cyfrannu, sydd yn cwestiynau'r cymaint o'r syniad yn Fylycos o gweithdd o'r cyfath, boen yw'r ch refreshing sydd â'u gweithio a'r cyfathau a'i'r cydnod, sy'n gystalion yn cael eu rhaglen, mae'r cyfrannu llei'r cydnod yn amlwg o'i gweithio'r cyfathau, yn sicr o fewn flynyddoedd ac mae unrhyw mwyllgor sy'n gyfathau cyfathau ac yn ymwgolol i'r cyfrannu llun o'r cyfathau. Sebastian yw'r cyfnod y Dau'r Cyfnod yw'r cyfnod yr ëEcologicaiddí, yw'r cyfnod yr ëResilioí. Yn ymddangos cymryd o'r ddechrau llyfr yn gyfnodol o'r ddau cyfnod ymlaen. Mae'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod ymlaen yw'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod yw'r ddechrau llyfr So we hold off the record, so the talk itself on the record, but when we have the Q&A session we apply the Chatham house rule to that engagement. So without any further delay may I introduce to you Sebastian Mer? Welcome to you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm really happy to be here with you today to have this discussion about resilience. What is this? It's quite a buzzword at the moment, resilience. I'm going to discuss about definition and more than all to show you what it means concretely talking about local policies. So a part will be theoretical and then I will illustrate with concrete project implemented or under implementation in Paris. Firstly I want to apologize for my bad English but most of the time you can understand more or less. People can understand more or less. I do my best. So I'm the chief residence officer for the city of Paris. Actually my position was just enlarged, upgraded a couple of days ago and now I'm also in charge of the climate plan and circular economy plan but I'm going to discuss today only about the resilience plan, the resilience strategy. So it's quite a new, quite an innovative position within local government because it's a cross cutting position. The chief residence officer has to be able to navigate in both the city departments and among a wide panel of external stakeholders from the academia, the private sector, NGOs, other public institutions and so on. It's a position that is in the middle between the political and the administrative side. I discuss both with both the elected officials and the head of departments and this position has to report either to the mayor or the head of the administration because to work in transversality this position can't be digged in a city department for environment for instance or whatever because it wouldn't be legitimate enough to work with transportation, housing and so on. So I report to the head of the administration in Paris and that gives me legitimacy to work with anyone in the city hall. This position is innovative also because it was created thanks to an international program launched by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2013, the 100 Resilient Cities and I have this incredible luck to have 99 almost colleagues, counterparts, doing the same job than me using the same methodology, the same tools from the five continents, in big cities, smaller cities, rich cities, poor cities, from the south, from the north and we've been benchmarking, exchanging best practices a lot together and that helps as you may know we can never copy paste a project from a country to another one because context are different, the culture, the regulation and so on but we can get inspiration and it helps a lot and for instance if I need to convince my colleagues from a city department that is telling me you know this favorite, now this is recorded, no? So we sometimes say no it's not possible, we can do that. You can say yes, Rotterdam did it, why? Paris won't be able to do it and even if smaller cities can and so this is really powerful, this international approach to work on this domain. So what are we talking about? We're not talking about the residents of the city hall. We're talking about the residents of the local authority. We're talking about the residents of the territory as a whole with everything included. It's public institutions, it's inhabitants, it's private businesses, it's infrastructures, built infrastructures, roads, buildings, bridges and so on but natural infrastructures as well, rivers, parks, forests, it's critical networks for energy, communication, transportation, it's flows of energy, people and so on. You know it's this vision, you probably heard about that, of the city seen as an urban metabolism, a life 24 hours, seven days with flows and breathing almost on a daily basis and we try to modelise the ability of this urban metabolism to keep on functioning and developing whatever is going to happen. Cities must be more prepared to face shocks, disasters that are going to increase in the coming decades. Talking about natural events, storms, flooding, huge heat waves and so on. It can be also a terrorist attack, it can be pandemias, all these main shocks that can affect the city but it's not enough. That's usually what we think when we discuss about residents, disasters, catastrophes but the residents' framework is much wider than that because it includes in the same time chronic stresses that affect the functioning of the city as well, inequalities, pollutions of air, soil, water, migrations, all these phenomena that are on a daily basis, they are not disasters or shocks but they are as much important as shocks to address and what proposes the residents' framework is to work everything in the same time within the same process, in a holistic and systemic approach. We could say to engineers that it's the city seen as a system of interconnected systems so it's a systemic approach. One decision you have in one of the systems will have consequences on other systems. I'll come back on the definition during Q&A if you want. So the six main challenges in Paris to illustrate residents' challenges in Paris, the first one, inequality, detailed its economic, social, cultural and territorial inequity that was targeted two years ago as a main risk for Paris and if you follow the news and the weekly demonstration ongoing in Paris at the moment, there are consequences of this. Paris can't think about its development within its border only and that's part of the strategy. We need to develop cooperation with other territories in order to build resilience. More than all, actually if we can sum up this, the more cohesive a society is, the more robust it is to face any kind of shock. In big cities we forgot to be careful about our neighbors. We don't even know, at least in Paris, we don't even know anymore who our neighbors are. That's a key for residents. Before thinking about the dam that is going to prevent the water to come during a flood, the residents approach says, what are we going to do once the dam will collapse? Okay, we need to content the people. So the people have to be solidar enough within each other to be residents. I'm going to give examples afterwards. Flooding, actually the river, is a resident's challenge itself in Paris. We know that a main flood will occur. That it will cost more than 100 billion euros according to the OECD and that we are not prepared yet. When I say we, it's not the city. Actually the city hall is more prepared than the other stakeholders of this main phenomena. We also know that the whole GDP of the country will fall down for five years because of this flood. So it's huge, it's a huge issue and the paradox is that the last one occurred a little bit than a century ago. But after a century of progress, we are much more vulnerable now. The city needed a couple of months to bounce back a century ago. We need five to ten years now because we created our own vulnerability with all these critical networks for communication, transportation, energy that were digged underground, close to the river, with this approach that is still running at the moment will find technical solutions. Don't worry, sleep cool, we'll find solutions. So far we don't have them but the techniques will save us. I'm challenging a lot this approach regarding techniques in general and promoting a lot low-tech solutions. We can discuss it afterwards. But the main risk is not this one regarding the river. It's the opposite risk. We know that the whole watershed will face water scarcity by the end of the century. And it's worse than a flood because the flood is a catastrophe, destructions, rebuilding. But when it's systemic and there is a lack of water at the whole region level, it's much worse for economy, agriculture, industry and even drinkable water supply. Air pollution, the main health stress actually in the world actually according to the World Health Organization. In Paris it kills 6,500 people every year. And it's one of the main political issues at the moment. You probably heard about the political polemics in Paris because the mayor is trying a lot to tackle and to address the scandal because air pollution is a scandal. But people still want to use their cars and so on and it's going to affect the economy. So let's keep these 6,500 deaths if the economy is saved. We've been challenging a lot this kind of positions. Terrorism and security, of course. And in my job I'm working mainly regarding this risk around social cohesion. How the city, the social corpus of the city is able to react positively after a terrorist attack, preventing Muslim bashing or tension between communities and so on. That's the way we've been working a lot on residents because it can affect a lot social cohesion. That is a key for residents. I may change, of course, and we're probably going to discuss with examples more about this mainstream risk, but both in its mitigation and adaptation issues. And actually adaptation is the main topic at the moment. Mitigation is, of course, but now in most of the countries we have even by the law obligations regarding mitigation. But adaptation is a key because it's too late to mitigate. Of course we have to keep on mitigating, but anyway we'll face consequences of climate change and we started to. Now there is something I'm often saying in conference, please never use this wording, future generations. That's why we discussed about sustainable development is the past decade thinking it was for the future generations that we did not do anything. It's not for the future generations, it's for us now. It's not even our children, it's us climate change, it's now. So stop talking about future generation and there is another wording that I'm challenging a lot. Save the planet. The planet doesn't care. We're talking about saving humanity, not the planet. The planet will survive to climate change. The climate doesn't have any problem with climate. The problem is humanity. And if we could use more this, we don't need to tackle climate change for the birds and the plants, just for the human. And it's not for the planet either. The planet already faced six massive extensions. Five we are entering in the sixth. And so doesn't care about all that stuff. So it's for humanity. All this is not for the planet, it's for humanity. And governance, last but not least, governance is always an issue talking about public policies, but it's particularly the case talking about residents. Of course it's not Paris itself that is going to address all what I just mentioned, within Paris border. We need new territorial cooperation with other territories. We need to work more with the private sector, with inhabitants and so on. These are six main challenges that we can anticipate. But a resident territory is a territory able to face anything and even the unexpected. Because in its daily functioning, qualities are developed like flexibility, capacity to bounce back, inclusivity, integration like crosscutting approach and so on, which are not the first words to come in mind when we think about public administration, flexibility for instance. And so that means that we still have a lot to do, but that's not impossible. And actually it's ongoing. So Paris voted its first resident strategy. You can download it on the website. I'm just going to illustrate what I just mentioned globally. With a couple of examples, concrete policies that were or are being implemented in Paris at the moment. To try to address these six main challenges I just mentioned. Three pillars. Up for the people. Count on the people to address all this. This is quite new. For instance in France at least. Talking about risk management, crisis management in France. We're still considering globally that the people, they don't know. So it's something that concerns the public authorities, not the people. And we definitely need to count on the people to train them, to inform them more about what's going to happen because they are going to be the responders to what's going to happen. Then infrastructure, the hard part. We need to change the way we build the city. We need to adapt this city. And in Paris, which is not a city but a postcard, it's quite complicated. Some of our projects are refused by the national services because they are too green. And the postcard is going to change if there is too much green on it. So no, please keep the concrete. The asphalt, because that's much better for the postcard. And too bad if 4550 people died in June 17 just within three days of heat wave. And so that's a huge challenge. How to combine adaptation with patrimony. In a city like Paris, that's one of the huge challenges. We need to train to tackle it, to address it. And then, third pillar, governance. Setting up a new kind of governance, daring, working more with the people, with the private sector, which is sometimes complicated in France. It's not a new layer added to the smart city, inclusive city, zero west city and so on because there are many movement like this ongoing in cities. It's something that is embedded in the other ones. I don't have any residents budget and I don't want to. I'm implementing residents within the existing budget. And that's a key for success. If I had asked for a dedicated budget, I would have a really small one and it would have stayed an experiment. And that's the key. First pillar, as examples, counting on people, preparing them, trying to develop this kindness among neighbours and include people within the design of policies. Sometimes. Just a couple of examples. I know that it exists here, I don't know, at least in England I guess it exists. But globally in the region, this civil contingencies, sometimes by the law in the Anglo-Saxon word, it's present. But in the Latin word, most of the time not. So we've been training real people in every neighbourhood to be ready to respond to anything. First aid gesture, how to react in case of flood, in case of heat wave, how can I support homeless in my neighbourhood. So both with this double scope, every time, ready to face main shocks, ready to help on a daily basis. And that's the idea. The chronic, the daily and the main shocks that are going to happen maybe once or twice a century. Another one, many people are ready to be more solidar. But they don't want anymore to enroll in an NGO and participate in administration board meetings and so on. So they can help easily. An example, we've been setting up in the streets, solidar fridges that are filled in by local shop owners, dwellers, people in charge of restaurants, they can leave unsolved food in the fridge and the most vulnerable people, they can just take it for free. So that's completely free, simple, really simple, easy to do, doesn't cost anything to anyone. And thinking holistically, for instance, one fridge as an experiment gets 120 kilos of food per day. So they are just for one fridge for one day. 120 kilos that were supposed to go to the trash, collected by a truck producing air pollution and getting far to be burned. OK, maybe produce a little bit of heat for our heat system, but that's not enough. Instead of this, it stays on site and is eaten by the most vulnerable. That's exactly the idea of this holistic approach, systemic approach. If you reconnect needs, actually it makes sense and it doesn't cost or almost not. Second pillar, infrastructure. And I'm just going to give you, because I want to check, OK, five minutes more, right? Seven. Infrastructure, the way we build the city. I'm just going to give you one example, which is a flagship action of the whole strategy. That was mediatised a lot. So if you want, even in English, the Guardian, for instance, released a huge article on this project, and so if you want more info, you can even find press article in English about this project. School yards, if we apply all what I just mentioned theoretically to one public facility, a school yard. There are school yards everywhere in the world. So we tried to apply these stratospheric ideas to something concrete. What does that mean for a school yard? At first, so we delivered three first pilots. And I'm going to tell you afterwards about scaling up. But these three first pilots, the picture is not that impressive because it was just delivered and vegetation didn't have time to grow and so it was just planted. So it's not green yet, but it will be. At first, no more asphalt on the ground. School yards in Paris represent 80 hectares, 100% made with asphalt, which is one of the worst material, ground material regarding residents, for both reasons, heat island effect, huge and rainwater management. It's not pervious, so it doesn't help us at all to get a better natural based solution, rainwater management. So we replace the asphalt by a new kind of material that is still concrete but pervious and that we can tent in a clearer color that reduces a lot the albedo effect and has concrete consequences on heat during heat waves. We plant trees before they grow up. We install artificial shade and we use for that air pictures mapping at night that tell us where it's the hottest in the school yard and that's exactly where we position the shade. We calculate where to put the shade and so on for the children. We bring the water in the middle of the school yard with a funny fountain. At first, children can drink themselves alone, which is not the case most of the time in our schools. They need to go with adults in the toilets really far and it can sprinkle when it's really hot for funny reasons. We assume that we want it to be funny. What is interesting with this kind of material is that when it's really hot, if you sprinkle water on it, it gets in and evaporates straight. So it creates cool again and it's funny. We have learning gardens in plain soil with children, these urban children learning how to grow vegetables. Of course, if we need to replace the playground, the games for the children, we try to make them locally in our fab labs using either material from circular economy or from geo or bio-sourced material. It's a holistic approach every time. Every time there is something, does it match with our goals in all the strategies? Of course, we co-create, co-design the project with the children themselves, with their teachers and with the parents in workshops. That's the occasion to train the children about climate change. So we'll have cooler places in schools to protect education for the children. But schools are the densest public facility we have in town. No one Parisian is living further than 200 metres from a school. Everybody knows where the school is because we go there to vote and because most of the time we had children in this school once upon a life. That's the perfect residence spot. So the idea is that once we use public money, energy of public civil servants to create a cool island for the children and guarantees a condition of education, if we apply this residence framework, how this project could be more useful for the same money, for the same energy. It will because we're going to open these cool islands to the elderly during heatwaves to protect health because three days of heatwave in Paris, as I mentioned, 450 deaths and you know that just for the older people, just being in a cooler place for a couple of hours is enough to preserve health. So the target is to save lives using the schoolyards. And third approach. Third, I mentioned social cohesion as a key factor for resilience. But in Paris, there is a huge lack of place for social cohesion. It's the fourth densest capital city in the world with the same densities in Mumbai, for instance. That's huge and parks and gardens are crowded all the time and so on. But in the same time, we have 80 hectares of schoolyards completely close to the public because of governance reasons. Only governance reasons. So that's why governance is a key for resilience. It's not always budget, more money, more... No, just align the stakeholders, change habits, culture. And it won't cost. It will cost maybe to change your opinion about something, but it won't cost to the people or to the city budget. But sometimes it's easier to get extra budgets than changing the minds. And so we had planned the pilot. Three were delivered last year. We had planned to deliver 10 more as pilots this year. But the mayor and the elected officials were so fan of these projects that they already asked for scaling up. I'm delivering 34 this year and the target is to change all of the 800 by 2040. So you can see how a pilot, a resilience pilot could become something that is now the only way we've been renovating schoolyards. We embedded it in the normal process. We want to renovate any schoolyards differently than this now. And that's the key regarding our climate policies. Most of the time they stay pilots or we have huge communication about the really great action and so on. But it's on the side. It's not the core business of the private business or the public organization. Of course, and I'm just going to end with a couple of questions and then I stop here to leave room for the Q&A. If you know Paris, you probably know the Ring Road. And transforming the Ring Road is a huge key for resilience in the whole region and not only for Paris. We are one of the last cities in the whole world to have such an infrastructure so close to the center. It's the hugest highway hub in Europe, the Ring Road of Paris. And it's four kilometers from the center. So we need to transform it. And that's an opportunity. Just a couple of examples regarding the third pillar about governance. I would give this one. As I just mentioned, experimenting is interesting, but we are in a hurry. And we won't experiment for decades before doing real things. So we were asked in my office to hire someone, and I'm looking for someone, actually, a kind of unicorn complicated to find, to invent new indicators that are going to orientate the whole capital plan of the city for the next mandate. So we're talking about 10 billion euros, orienting any euro of this capital plan to climate change adaptation and resilience. The idea is to have this new kind of framework that is wider than ODDs or wider than what we considered so far around sustainable development. But they would replace them and not be added to them, because that's something that we are used to do. Every time we have an idea, we add a new process or a new stuff. It won't work like this. We have to replace to create new things. And we already, for instance, included resilience goals for the first time in Frédéric Traité de Concesion de Zac. Jokers. Land planning, redevelopment project, land redevelopment project, like you have a zone, and we're going to develop a new neighbourhood on it, for instance. That's the last one in Paris, actually, because after that, the whole city is built. It is not place enough. So in one that is 70 hectares, a big one, the four first pages are trying to oblige all the future developers to respect resilience goals. So we'll see how it's working concretely. And the last one, we are really proud of this one. For the first time, Paris is considering that its development and its resilience depends on the countryside. And that's quite new for a capital city. So far, capital cities developed themselves without really taking into account the consequence of that development and surrounding territories. They needed to adapt surrounding territories to the development of the central capital city. So we signed an agreement with an association in France, association of municipalities. Municipalities with less than 3,500 inhabitants. This might be word for you here, but France has the specificity to have tons of villages. We have, you know, 35,000 municipalities in France and 35,000 mayors, for instance, and city councils and so on. So that's why governance is often an issue. But so the idea is that if we want to feed the city regarding the oldest resilience framework, we need to redevelop agriculture close to the city. If we want to be able to use the river to adapt to climate change, just swimming in it. That's one of the official targets of the city. We've been developing many technical systems that adapt to climate change. But for tens of thousands, we just had to go to the river. And we can do that. We're not able to do that because of things we did less than a century ago. But regarding history, it's nothing. We need to repair this and to use the water. But we need the farmers to change the way they grow vegetables, not to use any more pesticides and so on. So we need to deal with them. If we want to reduce air pollution, we need to create co-working centres far from the city in these villages. Because, for instance, 60% of our 55,000 employees don't live in Paris. And so we can, of course, we use commuting trips and increase air quality just developing co-working centres in these municipalities. So this is completely new. And it was done before the yellow jacket staffs that you probably heard about, a demonstration in Paris. But that's exactly around this idea. I will end with something that's maybe more political or philosophical. We haven't developed so far too much or enough risk culture policies because especially elected officials consider that it's anxiogenic. And it's too anxiogenic for the people to tell them the truth about what's going to happen and so on. So we prefer, especially at the national level in France, it's different at the city level. But at the national level, they're always scared that the people are going to panic and so on. So they better not to know what is going, for instance, to be a main flood in Paris. But resilience is different. Resilience is positive. Resilience is not anxiogenic saying we're going to have a flood. It's going to be a catastrophe how to manage the crisis. No, it's what do we need to do now to limit the risk of flood? What do we need to do now to prepare to bounce back as soon as possible and how these both movements can help us solve daily problems that we have with the same money and the same processes? The whole idea is to say that a framework that says to the people whatever are going to be the challenges in the century regarding climate, migration, economy or whatever, you can count on your mayors, your cities, your local governments not to be afraid because we're going to address them. Set something positive. Thank you very much.