 You are listening to the Make Change Happen podcast from IIED, the International Institute for Environment and Development. In today's episode, shared vulnerabilities, connecting climate change and health in cities, guest host Anna Walnicki from our Human Settlements team is joined by colleagues from India, Sierra Leone and the UK to discuss ways climate change and health practitioners can collaborate and learn together. Hi, my name is Anna Walnicki. I'm a senior researcher here at IIED and I'm going to be your host today. So, historically, communities working on public health crises, including pandemics, and communities responding to the risk of climate change and disasters in cities have had little interaction. More recently, they've been caused for closer engagement, often because of the impact that changes in climate and disasters have on public health in urban areas. The need for closer collaboration has become more urgent in the current context of the COVID-19 crisis. There is a growing realisation that connecting both communities could lead to more resilient and equitable cities. So, to discuss this today, we have three guests from the field of urban risk, climate change and public health, and I'll invite them to introduce themselves now. Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah McIver. I'm a climate change researcher at IIED. I've about eight years experience working in climate and disaster resilience, working mainly with community-based organisations, with civil society, with governments and with UN agencies, from the local to the national to the international level. Annie? Yes, hi. I'm Annie Wilkinson. I'm a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, where I've been working on epidemic diseases and epidemic control for about 10 years, and more recently, I've been working on urban health, and I'm an anthropologist, so I mostly think about the social dimensions of disease, transmission and control. And Aditya, you've only recently joined us. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Aditya Bahadur. I work at the International Institute for Environmental Development. I've been working at the intersection of urban development, climate change and disaster risk for almost 15 years now. I'm joining the podcast today from my home in Delhi, where I've been now sequestered for about four months as Delhi is fast becoming the epicentre of COVID in India, and India is fast climbing the rankings of the countries most affected by COVID anywhere in the world. So really pertinent to what we're talking about today. Thanks, Aditya. And we'll also be hearing from Joseph McCarthy, who's the Executive Director of the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre, also known as SWIRC, and he'll be joining us for some reflections later in the podcast. But before we get into the conversation, we thought it might be useful to think about why we're having this conversation right now. And so Anmal Arora, who's a climate change researcher that has been working on a paper on this theme of Aditya here at IID. Anmal is joining us from India today, and he's just going to set out a little bit about how COVID-19 is connected to climate risk and public health in cities, particularly in climate vulnerable countries. Anmal, over to you. Thank you, Anna. So I think the idea behind this paper and essentially this podcast came from an informal conversation between Aditya and myself, where we were thinking about these mega cities, London, New York, Mumbai, the places that had been celebrated as the drivers of global economic growth, and how they've simply been sort of down on their knees in the sense that their health systems have virtually been crippled because of COVID-19. And we started asking ourselves questions like, is there something about the design of these cities that makes them disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of pandemics, as well as climate change? What sort of similarities exist? And some interesting ideas emerged. For instance, it's quite obvious that both pandemics, as well as climate change, have huge human as well as economic costs. Going forward, we also see that there is evidence emerging that global environmental change is in fact bringing human and animal populations closer, which means that the probability of such pandemics is only going to increase in the future. Climate change is linked with migration. And in some cases, it also traps people in environmentally hazardous areas. Now with COVID-19, we've seen a lot of internal displacement, especially in global south in places like India. As Aditya mentioned, many of us have been sort of trapped in our homes, and this is unprecedented. We know that COVID-19 has impacted women more than men and some of the other social categories. And climate change tends to operate in similar ways. So in many ways, we see that there are certain similarities that are emerging. And perhaps there is ground for these communities to sort of start coordinating a little more closely. And that is essentially how this sort of idea for people came about. Thanks, Amal. That was really useful in setting this scene. We're going to begin our conversation with a panelist today by thinking about the potential of coalitions and partnerships. Now, I know that the climate change community have been promoting coalitions and partnerships in cities for some time. And I know that Sarah and Aditya have some examples of this, which will come to you very shortly. But I wanted to first ask Annie for her thoughts on how different actors and coalitions have been responding to pandemics and public health challenges in cities to date. Thanks. Yeah, I think this is an area where epidemic response and the public health community that respond to epidemics have quite a lot to learn. Yeah, I mean, first of all, recognizing these links between climate and disease, that's one thing. And then the other is recognizing that cities and urban settings are increasingly where these links are, you know, where climate and disease are meeting and we're seeing lots of outbreaks, an increasing number of outbreaks that have these kind of urban dimensions. But I think despite all of that, urban settings and urbanization is a bit of a blind spot for epidemic response. And it's kind of odd because historically, actually public health has been kind of rooted in lots of urban issues. So kind of think of cholera epidemics and the sanitary movements and all of that. But more recently, this epidemic response kind of architecture, I guess, has become quite dislocated maybe from some of that. And you kind of see outbreak response teams that are typically based in kind of ministries of health or in kind of special emergency operation centers and not really kind of integrated into the border health system or into, you know, city contexts and city governments. And the whole model really has been on kind of getting getting in quick and kind of shutting in epidemic down, identifying trains of transmission and all of that. And that typically is again, get quite top down, quite authoritarian. It has this kind of emergency thinking that dominates it. So it doesn't really lend itself to collaborative, you know, coalition based approaches. And so, yeah, I mean, I just think that it's not that there aren't aspects of there aren't, you know, there aren't people in public health that are doing all of this. Actually, if you think about HIV, there's been a huge amount of kind of thinking about kind of local legitimacy and engaging and with local communities and all the kind of coalition stuff. But I think when it comes to this kind of emergency disease response and pandemics and epidemics, yeah, they haven't been doing it very well. And in particular, these kind of urban, the urban systems are a bit of a blind spot for public health. So, Aditya, have you, have you got any reflections on more holistic responses that have come from the climate change community that have responded to some of the challenges that they have been working on in cities and urban areas? Yeah, I mean, I firstly, I totally agree with what Annie said. And what's absolutely clear to me is that protracted and complex crises like the types that we're talking about cannot be solved without developing partnerships with a range of organizations and actors that all come with different skill sets to solve a problem. Experts working on tackling climate and disaster risk have understood this now for quite a long time. And there are large numbers of examples of projects that seek to build urban resilience by engaging with a wide number of actors. I'll give you a personal example from about 10 years ago, I was engaged in a project to build resilience in a city that was something from flooding. It was quite a small city, quite a small project. But even within the small project, there was a university, there was a chambers of commerce, there was a municipal corporation, there were political leaders, there were community-based organizations, there were vulnerable communities themselves, there were civil society organizations and NGOs all coming together to tackle one single problem of flooding in this town. So that's just one illustration of a large number of projects that seek to develop partnerships to deal with change. And therefore I feel that those trying to manage epidemics need to learn from this because as Annie rightly said, up till now we've seen a fairly top-down linear response to epidemics. And again, like emerging examples from places like Dharavi, which is Mumbai's largest slum and one of the largest slums in Asia, it was slated to be a massive COVID hotspot because there were some early cases of COVID a few months ago. But now two months down the line, there are only a handful of cases in Dharavi, whereas Bombay has a large number of cases or Mumbai that's called now has a large number of cases. And this is because informal medical practitioners, informal sanitation workers, local organizations have all been embraced by the government in trying to tackle this problem in Dharavi, which has been the reason for its success. So yes, absolutely. Partnerships and collaboration is absolutely key to solving this problem. Thanks Aditya. Sarah, is there anything specific that you wanted to bring in on this point? Thanks Anna. From the climate change side, there is certainly recognition of some of the links with climate and health. I think one of the main things that a lot of the fear is about thinking about the rise in temperatures across the planet and what that means for the likes of malaria moving into new areas in which it wasn't before, where often a colder temperature meant that there wasn't so much transmission of malaria. Also, the increase in precipitation, heavier rainfall across cities, across urban areas, that increased risk of flooding that results in that. And as a result then that sort of potential for more cholera outbreaks and what that means. So there is recognition from the climate change side, but there still needs to be much more done and sort of bringing in the health experts and sort of thinking about planning together. Climate change side, there's often developing the climate action plans referred to as these nationally determined contributions and that lists a number of sectors. So we'll talk about plans for agriculture, for forestry, for water management, but health is still a key gap. I want to share an example from my own experience from previously from working in Indonesia on sort of effective coalitions and effective partnerships from the disaster and resilience side. So basically Indonesia, they call themselves the supermarket of disasters. They have everything. They have tsunamis, earthquakes, landslides, flooding, typhoons, volcanoes, basically every disaster, every natural hazard imaginable. So what they've done basically is a lot of, they've tried to shift from the immediate response following a disaster into much more about the preparation, the mitigation, trying to minimize the hazard altogether. They've also recognized the importance of building partnerships in country. And so in order to do that, the disaster management agency, so a department within government, is working with the UN in order to organize these monthly meetings, where they bring all the actors together, that actors from civil society, actors from across government, from UN agencies, everyone that's working sort of to minimize risk in country. And they update each other. They share learning. But what that's done, because it's happening so regularly on a monthly basis, it's been able to improve trust building, improve relationships, and move from just sharing lessons to actually coordinating together so that when a disaster does strike, which is quite inevitable in Indonesia, straight away, they've got an immediate real-time response. And they can match the skill sets that are needed to what is required to deal with that disaster. So just to summarize then basically, building the trust and relationships in country can really help to bring these actors together in a strong coalition. I just wanted to pick up on something that Aditya said. And I think it's really interesting to hear about the examples from India. And of course, there is a huge amount of kind of local kind of collective action that is happening and sometimes joined up with authorities for COVID and sometimes not. I mean, on just another comment on the public health side of things, I think there has long been recognition of the need for kind of community engagement and so engaging with local leaders and traditional healers and stuff. But it has been quite rural, really. And I think when it comes to epidemics in urban areas, there is a little bit, you know, it's just kind of not clear, like how do you adapt kind of all of these kind of community engagement processes that have been honed quite well for rural areas, for urban settings. And I think, you know, whether it's Zika in Latin America or Yellow Fever in Angola or the West African and more recent DRC Ebola outbreaks, like they had really significant kind of urban dimensions to them. And it was just really quite a challenge. It wasn't clear who were the actors, and particularly in places like informal settlements, like who were the trusted local leaders? What are the governance structures? So I think that's, I just wanted to kind of make that point that those are the things where I think the public health and epidemic response community is kind of missing. Yeah, Annie, I mean, I fully understand what you're saying, because like 10 years ago, when the climate change and disasters community was starting to express an earnest interest in urban areas, we grappled with the same problems. Participatory methods that had been tested and tried in rural areas were kind of being mindlessly transplanted in the urban areas and were not quite working. So it's been a 10-year learning period for us. And I imagine that the epidemics community also is probably at the start of that learning period. So we're already getting at the value of taking a more connected and integrated approach to climate change, public health and pandemic responses. Now, I'd like to encourage us to think a bit about who should be involved in such responses in urban contexts. Aditya, just coming back to you, I know that the climate change community have extensive examples of working with city level governments and other urban stakeholders. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about the specific opportunities of working with actors at the city level. Sure. Anna, I think what is key to a comprehensive and systematic response to such crises is sustained political attention. And these issues need to be a priority for politicians and city leaders. And therefore, I really feel that transnational networks of city leaders have shown a lot of value over the last couple of decades. And I've really been pivotal in ensuring that issues of climate and disaster-risk in cities receive the kind of sustained political attention that they need. You know, organizations like the mayor's covenant, local governments for sustainability, the United Cities and local governments, the Asian cities, the resilience network, and C40 all provide potentially replicable models for those who are attempting to manage COVID-19 and who would like to ensure that issues of tackling epidemics stay in the political spotlight going forward. Taking just one example, C40 started 15 years ago by Ken Livingston, the mayor of London, who convened a bunch of his counterparts from 18 cities. And now 15 years later, it's grown into a network of 96 cities that contain something like 10% of all humanity. And by encouraging peer-to-peer learning between these cities, the cities in the network have taken something like 10,000 actions to tackle climate change over time. And in a recent evaluation, it was found that 70% of the cities that are part of C40 reported taking an action based on learning from another city. Most of this work has not been in times of crisis. So this transnational network of city leaders has demonstrated that it's possible to keep attention going even when no emergency is breaking. And I suspect there's a valuable learning here for those attempting to manage COVID and who'd like to ensure that this issue receives the kind of attention even once the curves have been flattened in cities across the world. Annie, would you agree? Yeah, no, I would. And I think it's really interesting to kind of reflect on the public health, I guess, experience or side of things. And I think it's probably helpful to make this a distinction between when we're talking about kind of public health more generally, and the more kind of everyday disease control kind of hygiene sanitation and health systems are huge, you know, huge broad range of things. And then, you know, epidemic response and pandemics, which is outbreaks of disease, which are exceptional or unusual. And I've been talking mostly actually about the kind of epidemic response side of things. But I think one of the challenges which links a bit to the kind of climate change example is that to be able to kind of mitigate the risks of epidemics and pandemics, we need to be kind of building stronger health systems and addressing kind of basic public health systems and to do all of that, you know, outside of epidemic context. And I think that's the thing that we I mean, it's not that we're not doing it. Obviously, there's a huge amount of kind of health system strengthening work going on. But but I think oftentimes not enough and not significantly linked to thinking about, yeah, mitigating mitigating pandemic risk. And actually just so I think a big question actually is how do you encourage kind of action in normal times, which lessens the risk of pandemics. And that's not just in the health sector, but it's like really importantly actually in the non health sector as well. I think those kind of considerations are not are not made enough. And yeah, and in general, I think we've been quite poor at investing in things that contribute to prepare this. So we talk a lot about prepared this in epidemic response and stuff. But we tend to talk of it in quite a narrow way. So it's mostly drugs and vaccines and not actually enough of this, you know, basic public health and border kind of resilience issues, which could involve all of this kind of climate stuff that you're talking about. So Annie, can I just ask you, I'm really worried, you know, we've seen over the last few months, as the crisis has been breaking across cities, we've seen, you know, city leaders really taking an active role, we've seen press conferences taking place every evening, we've seen mayors, you know, who are really at the forefront leading this fight. Are you worried like me, that once the curve start to be flattened, things will go back to business as usual, and people will start focusing on other issues, and this will again take the backseat till the next crisis. Well, it's a tough question. I am worried. I guess I've done some of my previous research has been looking in Sierra Leone and the impacts of the Ebola epidemic there. And, you know, and everyone there was like, this has got to be a game changer. We can't go back to how it was before. And it is, I think it's fair to say that, you know, the country was not transformed after that. It did suffer a huge economic crisis at the same time as the Ebola outbreak. So, I mean, we're currently in this point where everyone is kind of looking at the way we have organized society and saying we need to change. But yeah, I guess worried or a healthy kind of skepticism of like, we need to, words are not enough. And how we actually translate that interaction, I'm not sure. But I do also think that kind of epidemics are huge learning experiences. So, I think the kind of scale of COVID and what it really has kind of revealed, and the way that's brought so many kind of people along with it, and to see how kind of health and non health issues are kind of so interrelated. I don't know. I have hoped that maybe through that learning, there is potential for change. I completely, I agree, Annie, and just to say that, you know, the health sector is not, it's not alone. This is very much the climate sector feels the same. And that, that recognition, you know, that this has to be, you know, if we are to tackle these crises, whether it's a pandemic, a health pandemic, or the climate crisis, it has to involve all of us. It has to come out, not just the technical experts, it has to be everyone, all the public working together to really, to really manage that. You mentioned some of the actions that are needed. And I think maybe to share some, maybe key ingredients, especially for kind of the city leaders, you know, something like a resilience program or plan that kind of is long term and an overarching that helps to bring all the sectors together, you know, having sort of allowing some authority and autonomy to these city leaders, like through decentralization, so that they can actually make and implement some of the decisions in that planning, you know, that they have that full autonomy to do so. And the financial resources to support the implementation as well. So just sort of maybe some ways in which we can kind of help to bring health and climate out of the silos. Quickly, I just want to share an example of some of the work that we do in IED. Basically, in IED, we provide support to the least developed countries on climate, a group of 47 countries across Africa, Asia, Pacific and the Caribbean. They've recognized this, they've recognized that, you know, that a lot of, a lot of key work that's done by experts, they kind of sometimes fly in and fly out of the country, and that's not necessarily the most sustainable approach. So what they've done is they've launched their own initiative called the LDC Initiative for Effective Adaptation and Resilience. The acronym is LifeAR, you know, we love our acronyms in this, but basically that initiative, it aims to strengthen in-country systems, including healthcare systems and capabilities to respond in real time immediately to both slow onset, you know, and rapid shocks and stresses, whether they're pandemics, whether they're climate related. They're trying out these new approaches. They're encouraging the international community to help them and keeping the learning in country and sharing that learning so that it doesn't get lost. And the LDC group are, you know, hoping to share that new way of working with city leaders and local governments across the world, including in the global north as well. That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing that. So at this point, I think we could usefully turn to Joseph McCarthy, who is Executive Director of SLURC in Sierra Leone. We know that they've been working with the city government in Freetown and other urban actors on climate change and Ebola. So Joseph, what are the challenges and benefits of working at the city level for an organization like SLURC? Thanks so much, Anna. Essentially, we have chose to focus on cities because firstly, cities are areas of population concentration, especially in the case of Sierra Leone. Like Freetown concentrates about 40% of the total urban population within the country. And therefore, cities are expected to provide a lot of opportunities. But also, these are some of the areas where we have the worst living conditions for human existence. So we think that it is important to focus on cities because of the huge disparities in health, well-being, as well as the level of risk it presents to the residents. So we have been working in the city for nearly four years. So basically, if I was to talk about the challenges, I think the first challenge should be about how do we, because our area of focus has been informal settlements. But actually, within the trust of informal settlements to the kinds of work that we do, especially research has been a lot difficult. And this is so because most of them expect financial reward whenever we engage them. And they think it should be about giving them money just like some NGOs do. And the point is, for most of these communities, a lot of research has been done in the past decades. But there is very little to show for it. And so it's really difficult to get communities to be convinced that these particular kinds of work that we do would really go to benefit them. And another difficulty has been so much about how do we really engage policymakers to really utilize some of the outputs that we produce, but also to be able to engage them. Because for many, everything's based decision making has not been part of their culture. And so this is a major problem that we continue to grapple with. The other aspect is that it is really difficult for us to really engage even the media houses to convey some of our output, because most of them seem to be a lot interested in political news. And another difficulty as an institution is that we really don't have many people who really can be described as grounded researchers. It is very difficult to hire the right kind of staff that we really want. So it has been very difficult. But at the same time, there are a lot of benefits in working in the city. Firstly, it creates easier visibility of our work in the sense that people get to know us, whether or not they like it, they get to know about us. And it also produces or provides us an opportunity to interface with a range of other actors, both locally and globally, but also provides us the opportunity to interface and interact with a number of policymakers, a number of politicians as well. And it's so much important to us because it allows us to build our own professional as well as economic career, because my background is urban planning and development. And so therefore, working in the city allows me to foster that particular kind of agenda. We're going to move on now to think a little bit about data. In the past months, we've seen governments rely on big data to make decisions and policies in response to COVID-19. And there have been some clear successes in some contexts and major challenges in others. Before asking for Annie's reflections on this, I'd like to ask Aditya about the potential to use data more innovatively in the management of climate and disaster risks in cities. Sure. So I first want to state that I'm not a big data evangelist. Like you, Anna, and you, Annie, I did my studies at IDS, which is the hall of participatory development. So I really don't think that big data is a silver bullet. And given my background in logical and sociological research methods, I approach big data as a skeptic. With that qualifier, I really feel strongly that big data generated through sort of innovative ICT devices can effectively complement existing ways of understanding the impacts of climate change in cities. Let me give you one very quick, tangible example. Other areas are microclimates and air temperature can vary from block to block. And therefore it's very difficult in cities to do temperature readings, which then has implications for how you prepare for heat waves. So that's a big sort of black hole that we really haven't been able to fill yet. There's one innovative approach that's trying to overcome this. What they're doing is they've developed an app through which the crowdsource battery temperature data from half a million cell phones spread across cities in the United States. They've then developed an algorithm through calibrating it in the real world that converts battery temperature data into air temperature data. So through this app, they're now collecting razor sharp air temperature readings from cities across the United States, which then has big ramifications for how cities prepare for heat waves that are going to become more and more frequent as climate change progresses. That's just one small example of a big data application that can really change the game when it comes to reducing risk from a major climate hazard in cities. Yet we have seen that those who are making policies and decisions with regard to reducing risk in cities have been really slow to adopt these innovative approaches. Therefore, I really feel that our community of practice, that is the people who are trying to reduce risk in cities can learn something from the people who are tackling epidemics because they've really been successful in pushing these big data solutions from contact tracing to developing algorithms to determine how lockdowns of different cities and municipalities need to be. They really got policy makers to take big data for decision making seriously and I think there's a learning in there for the people who are trying to deal with climate change with all the qualifications that I discussed at the beginning of this. Yeah, I think there is obviously a huge potential to a big data. I'm not a big data denialist, but I do think that I guess all forms of data need to be contextualized and I think that we need to be careful about how much we trust some of this kind of big data and what signals it's reading and all of that. I guess I'd like to highlight two of the other kind of data or information areas that I think are really, really important. One, if we're talking about urban settings and particularly the informal urban settlements that a lot of us and IID obviously have done a lot of work on, we know there's a huge amount of missing data and I think that's really come up in really been highlighted by COVID actually because we've just actually have really limited information on the numbers of kind of people living in a particular settlement and so the numbers of people that could be at risk. We don't know enough about kind of their livelihoods and the prevalence of particular diseases, all of these kind of comorbid infections that could make the disease worse, diabetes and hypertension and all those things. So I think it's just, there's a real need for improved kind of local data and a lot of that is obviously done like lots of the federations collecting their own data and that's brilliant and I think that needs, we need more of that. The other area where I have been doing a lot of kind of standing on stoke boxes with colleagues at IDS is about social science and kind of social and contextual insights. So we've been running this thing with the social science and humanitarian action platform which is a network really of social scientists and it aims to mobilise kind of social science knowledge and analysis in epidemic response. So really just kind of saying that this deep kind of granular knowledge about local places, politics, practices and cultures is also really really important and often not valued or recognised and also not always available actually enough in an outbreak kind of situation. So that's about the kind of inclusion of social science and social scientists, it's also about the inclusion of local communities and their views and their perspectives. Those would be my kind of data priorities. That sounds great Anna and sort of linked to that in a way is sort of from the climate side there's a lot of big models that are used to sort of try and plan scenarios as to how the climate's going to change but these are quite large scale you know the really like high resolution that doesn't really get down to the local level you know and that's what's needed for to help kind of local farmers and local government planners and you know to make decisions and so there's a gap there and basically what's needed is that sort of like bring you know the scientific knowledge as well as the local and indigenous knowledge coming together to join the dots to share their knowledge together equally as ideas and to help kind of like address those gaps. This is something that is recognised in the Paris Agreement on Climate the importance of indigenous knowledge so I do see an opportunity there moving forward that hopefully we connect those together. Thanks so what I'm taking from this is that we need data to be generated on a number of different scales particularly at the local level and in informal settlements where there's a huge gap still and although big data is incredibly useful to make policy decisions in a pandemic and also in response to climate change context is is very very important when it comes to implementation. We've covered a lot of ground we've identified some really relevant synergies between the climate change and pandemic communities it very much feels like this is the beginning of a discussion or a conversation that's increasingly relevant for cities particularly in the global south. Before thanking you all I'm going to end with a question that we always finish with in this podcast series. What is the one change that you think could really make a difference in cities in the global south and I'm going to start with you Annie. Thanks so mine is obviously health orientated and well epidemic orientated so I am linking really to what I just said that I'd like to see more interdisciplinary and inclusive approaches to the way that we manage epidemics so both mitigate and and respond to them. I think we've seen a lot of progress on that but I think yeah more social science and in that I would include more urban researchers and stakeholders and more participation of local residents and communities in recognizing their diverse forms of expertise. Thanks Annie Sarah. Thanks Anna. I would say I'd like to see kind of not only inclusive but also the empowerment at local level in particular so those those who are closest to the issue often know it best and so appreciating that and appreciating sort of the skills that are there and empowering those local leaders to take action to make decisions to implement their plans and to really really empower and build that at the local level is what I'd yeah I'd like to see more of both from responding to climate challenges as well as pandemics. Aditya over to you. What's really clear to me is that you know the same sorts of people who are vulnerable to epidemics are also broadly those people who will be vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and actions to deal with climate change can have a positive impact on future epidemics as well. So for me it's really important that there's an institution at the city level that is able to join the dots and make decisions across sectors and look at the city as a complex system holistically to deal with these multiple threats. There are some emerging examples of this. The New York Mayor's Office of Resiliency is one such institution that looks at these different threats holistically to come up with a strategic solution and I think that's why we've seen that New York has gone from being the epicenter of this global pandemic to flattening the curve fairly quickly. Yeah that's a really really relevant example there. Thanks teacher. Anmore the one change you'd like to see that really make a difference. That's a tough one. Anna look post climate shocks the window of a window of opportunity shuts rather quickly. I mean to put it simply we just move on and what I'd like to really see is leaders, political or otherwise championing this cause over a long term. Thank you and we're going to give the last word to Joseph. Let's look over in Freetown. Joseph the last word goes to you. I think one major change I would like to see is about really getting the different actors the different institutions the different individuals working on the urban to work collaboratively on the kinds of issues that we have chosen to really address as a city the kinds of issues that people living in informal settlements are very much concerned about. It can be in the area of health like we have a few projects that focuses on those it can be in the area of resilience into our vulnerability issues especially in terms of the kinds of disaster risks that we have been confronted very recently and so it's about avoiding or moving away from the culture of working in silence because no one organization no one individual has all the answers to the kinds of challenges that the city face. That's great thank you so much. You can find out more about this podcast episode and IID's work in this area including the initiatives and organizations discussed on our website at www.iiid.org slash podcast. We greatly value our listeners opinion so please leave us your feedback and comments at soundcloud.com slash the IID that's soundcloud.com slash T-H-E-I-I-E-D there you can also listen to our previous podcast and the May Change Happens series. The podcast is produced by our in-house communications team. For more information about IID and our work please visit our website at www.iiid.org