 I'm now going to share with you the outcomes of the conference that we've had so far. And I'm going to do two things. Firstly, frame the issue that we've been discussing, which as you can see, the theme is enhancing resilience of urban communities. And then I mentioned a few of what we are calling statements, which are not just recommendations to somebody to do something, but recommendations for somebody to do something and promising an offering to do something about that with them ourselves. So one of the traditions of the CBA conferences is we like to make final statements of commitment, their pledges of things that we pledge to do and not just asking other people to do things, although we do ask other people to do things, but we also pledge to work with them to make them happen. So let me start with the first one. And that's the issue of urbanization. And as you know, the world now is about 50% already in cities and urban areas. And it's going to get bigger. That proportion is going to rise about 50% very, very quickly. And of them, about a billion people live in informal settlements, but sometimes we used to call slums, but now we call informal settlements. And a majority of the fastest growing smaller towns are in Asia and Africa. And so that frames what we are talking about here. But at the same time, cities are very strongly linked to both the rural population, places like Dhaka and others. We have a continuum of people coming in from the rural areas, connected to the rural areas, and to the larger ecosystems within which the urban conurbations sit. So cities are not just confined to themselves. They sit within a larger ecosystem that needs to be taken into account. And the final point is an emphasis on local governance. Very often, particularly in the smaller cities and towns, there is a lack of local governance capacity, which constrains the ability of the municipal authorities to develop a user-friendly, community-friendly city for the citizens of that city. Moving on to the issue of climate change in the context of cities or urbanization or urban areas, very often the most vulnerable people living who are vulnerable to climate change also happen to be the poorest people in a city living in the most vulnerable areas of that city. And this is true as much for cities like Dhaka or cities like, say, New Orleans in the United States, where when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, more than a thousand people lost their lives. All those thousand people were poor people living in the ninth ward of the city, which is one of the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the city. None of the rich people in New Orleans died from Katrina. So even in rich countries, the people who are most vulnerable tend to be poor, and in city contexts they tend to be living in the most vulnerable areas. A lot of cities are on coastal zones, and coastal zones in particular low-lying coasts are now one of the most threatened by long-term climate change impacts like sea level rise, and we are certainly seeing that in Bangladesh now, particularly in the southeast coast of Bangladesh, a southwest coast, sorry, of Bangladesh, around Kulna in that area, and Kulna City, for example, is definitely seeing the impacts of salinity intrusion. The other thing that we can say about cities is that informal settlements in cities are very often the most vulnerable. Even rich people and middle-class people can also be vulnerable, and they also have a role to play. But generally speaking, the poorest people living in the informal settlements tend to be amongst those that are most vulnerable, and hence deserve a special focus going forward. And at the same time, in the climate change context, cities happen to be the places that have very high carbon footprints. They account for a large amount of the emissions, global emissions, and therefore also have a role in reducing those emissions through mitigation. And the last point is the most important point from the point of view of this conference, and we had a lot of evidence presented here from many, many different countries. That much is already happening. Many communities are already active. They're trying to build resilient cities. This is not a blank canvas. We're not starting from zero. There is a lot of work being done that we can build on. We can share and learn from each other, and that's the purpose of this conference, and we can build on going forward. And the third element, again, building on that last one from the previous slide, is about those urban communities. And as I said, they're thriving. They're taking place. The cities all have mixed communities, which include both formal and informal settlements, rich and poor, middle-class inhabitants, all have to come together to do things for the city. Often they do, sometimes they don't, but making that happen is the key. And there are many different groups that include women, children, elderly, disabled, amongst others, ethnic minorities sometimes, and so on. So we need to take account of these differences, but at the same time see how they can all be involved in both planning for the city, going forward and managing the city in real time. And one of the most important things is that many of the communities are already becoming self-organized. We heard examples, and we have actually representatives from a number of those communities in Philippines and in other countries here, that 300 cities in Asia, and well over 600 communities around the world, have active community-led activities, and they include savings groups. So people are funding themselves. They're saving money, they're managing it in collaboration with local government. These are not micro-credit schemes or NGO schemes. These are community-led schemes that are actually putting money together and using it for themselves, for their own infrastructure and betterment. And that these informal settlement communities now are linked both within countries and there are a number of them in Bangladesh that are already there. They form federations at the national level and they have federations at the both regional level in the Asia case for the Asian housing groups and globally with the slum and shack dwellers international, for example. So they are getting their act together. They are moving to scale. And we had a number of examples here and people from these organizations with us over the last few days. And we heard some very good examples of their work. And so that's what we are going to be focusing on as we make our recommendations go forward. So there's three sets of recommendations or statements we're calling them, aimed at different audiences. And as I said, in each case, there are advocacy messages for an audience but supported by offers to engage to make them happen. The first one is with respect to climate finance. And what we are saying is that those who are producing and providing climate finance for adaptation in particular need to find ways of providing support to these informal settlements in the cities. It is not easy to do and by and large, most of them have failed to do it. They recognize it's an important thing to do but they haven't found good ways of actually delivering it. And our proposition is that the best way to do so is to find intermediaries who can actually manage to take money in millions, tens of millions, but provide them to the communities in small grounds. The communities don't need millions. They need maybe 10,000 or 20,000 dollars or euros or whatever the currency is. And so you need an intermediary who can take large amounts of money, manage it, provide it to the communities in smaller amounts and then monitor the effective use of that. And there are such organizations now. I just mentioned two of them. The Asian Housing Rights Group and the Slum and Shackwellers International. And so the final point is with regard to aimed at the Green Climate Fund. And one of the reasons why we have done that is that we happen to have one of the board members of the Green Climate Fund sitting at the table here on the far left of the table from our side Dr. Kamaluddin Amant from Bangladesh who represents the least developed countries group as a board member of the Green Climate Fund and who has been fighting for this cause for some time, I can tell you, from personal experience. And so the recommendation which we would like to pass on to the GCF board through him is that the GCF board should find ways for fast track enhanced direct access for these kinds of intermediary agencies that can deliver to smaller communities on the ground. At the moment the larger amounts of money tend to go to large infrastructure development projects because those are easy to absorb large amounts of money and spend large amounts of money and they tend not to go to intermediaries who can deliver it in small amounts to communities and what we are arguing for is that that needs to be done if we want to help the most vulnerable. The second set of recommendations or statement that we are making is to another group who are actually orders of magnitude more important or larger in terms of their funds which is the infrastructure in the cities and this is particularly relevant for Asia where there are going to be over the next decade trillions of dollars of investments made in infrastructure in cities like Thaka we are seeing that happen right now of the cities in Bangladesh and across the continent from a variety of sources the international development banks the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank the new infrastructure bank that's been created from private sector investments from a variety of sources from national government acceptors huge amounts of money are going to flow into infrastructure Our argument is that in order for that investment to result in resilient cities they need to incorporate the views and the inputs from local communities in the planning phase of those infrastructure development without doing that they are likely to either displace citizens of their own city or not benefit the citizens of their city so if the ultimate beneficiaries are to be citizens of the city then we need to involve those very citizens particularly the more vulnerable in the planning process to make their views into account as much as possible and then finally the final point is again related to what I just said which is that we have not made this investment yet the trillions of dollars I'm talking about are still to be spent and so we can start planning that it gets spent well now if we spend it not properly then retrofitting or fixing things afterwards is a lot more expensive so this actually represents a window of opportunity the right kinds of decisions on investments and for those who are going to make those decisions on investments our appeal is please do ensure that you consult with citizens with the poorer citizens in particular and again we have a variety and a plethora of organizations here from many many cities around the world who can engage and provide that engagement process consultation process and are quite willing to do so the third and I think the final set of recommendations are to do with governments, national governments generally and the recommendation is to focus on local governments and to build the resilient cities often being the constraint often being lack of capacity in local government particularly in the smaller towns and the upcoming towns as it were so across the next decades one of the things that we will see is that what is now considered to be a rural part of a country is going to end up being an urban part of that country that same geography that same place but we're not thinking about how it's going to look we're just letting it happen willy-nilly and then before we know it there's a town where there wasn't only villages before so we need to think about these towns of the future as it were and start putting in some kind of infrastructure that is both useful for the inhabitants particularly from a climate change perspective useful for the most vulnerable inhabitants of those places but do it in a planned manner that then delivers a city or a town that is actually conducive to live in for its inhabitants and the final point being the most vulnerable communities always suffer the most both from poverty and from lack of good governance as well as from climate change impact so the poorest and most vulnerable are always going to be the victims of whatever new risk that emerges whether the risk comes from lack of good governance or it comes from this new emerging issue of climate change