 My name is Aditya Bahadur and I'm a Principal Researcher in the Human Settlements Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development. And I'm the co-author of a new book called Resilience Reset, Creating Resilient Cities in the Global South, that is being published by Rutledge next month. For the first time in the history of the world, more people live in towns and cities than rural areas. At the same time, most cities are located along rivers or along the coast, and therefore are highly exposed to the impacts of a changing climate. At the same time, cities concentrate vast numbers of poor people, at least cities in the global south, and are increasingly facing multiple interacting shocks and stresses, and therefore they're really on the front lines of risk. Additionally, the nature of risk that cities are facing is changing. Multiple different kinds of hazards and disasters are happening at the same time. For instance, a recent report from the International Red Cross found that over 55 million people have faced the onslaught of COVID-19 and floods, storms, drought, and heat waves. Also, extreme events that used to be very rare are occurring more and more frequently. Now the book argues that we need to acknowledge that the nature of risk is changing, and therefore the ways in which we build the resilience of cities need to shift too. And therefore in this book, we trace five shifts in five key areas of resilience action to ensure that cities are able to withstand the impacts of climate change and other related shocks over the next few decades. In this book, we argue that the ways in which the global community of practice working to reduce risk from climate change and disasters and cities has been operating needs to shift to account for the changing nature of risk in cities. More specifically, we argue for shifts in five areas. We argue that existing ways of acquiring and analyzing the data on how climate change is impacting cities need to be complemented with a new generation of approaches that use artificial intelligence and big data to understand climate impacts in cities. There are lots of examples of how data from drones, cell phones, ATM machines is now plugging gaps in the data environment and can be really useful in understanding the impacts of climate change. Number two, we argue that working with poor and vulnerable urban communities lies at the core of any meaningful enterprise of urban resilience, but the book makes a case for ensuring that we pivot or shift from the current incremental and piecemeal approach of dealing with low income urban communities to more transformative approaches that deliver sustainable long term gains and that go to the root causes of risk as opposed to merely dealing with approximate causes. Finally, we acknowledge that urban planning has been a very valuable entry point for building the resilience of cities, however, we argue that urban planners have traditionally concerned themselves with the formal city. However, we find across the world, over a third of every city on average across the world is informal. In urban areas like sub-Saharan Africa, this number goes up to 51%, and therefore it is crucial for urban planning to include informality much more meaningfully. More specifically, we argue that urban plans must engage with informal actors, informal knowledge and informal practices. Number four, urban sectors and services, health, energy, transport, water are all critical for the health, well-being and resilience of a city. However, in these sectors, most of the action that has taken place to enhance the resilience has focused on infrastructural or hard solutions. And in the book, we argue that we need to pivot towards a focus on enhancing the capacities and capabilities of those managing and running these critical urban systems to deal with uncertainty and climate impacts. And finally, we acknowledge that none of this is possible without the right kind of finance. We demonstrate how cities have traditionally relied on internal sources of revenue for enhancing resilience such as municipal revenues or intergovernmental transfers that are under strain, or external revenues from bilateral or multilateral organizations and philanthropies that have not provided the financing at scale that is needed to enhance resilience. And therefore, in the book, we argue for a shift towards new and innovative financing mechanisms such as resilience bonds, land value capture schemes, and broadened engagement with the private sector. So in all these five areas of action, we're arguing for a pivot or shift towards new ways of doing things, essentially arguing that the current paradigm of urban resilience needs to be reset. The book is targeted towards two or three key audiences. One, we feel that practitioners working to enhance the resilience of cities to climate change and disasters will benefit from a range of operational examples that chapters of the book contain on processes and methods for building resilience. So the book is quite practical and tangible, as opposed to endlessly naval gazing about concepts and frameworks. Second, we think policymakers will benefit from reading the book, because it draws on a range of policies from across the developing world that has demonstrated impact on enhancing the resilience of cities. Number three, I feel students who are doing master's courses in sustainable development of PhDs in urban development will benefit because the book is a comprehensive treaties on the field of knowledge on urban resilience, and also presents cutting edge developments in this field. So from one volume, the students will be able to acquire this latest understanding. Most of the arguments of the book were developed before COVID-19 had its full impact. So of course, we were very worried that our insights would probably not be valuable now that the world and the world cities have shifted so dramatically, the risk landscape has altered. However, on careful analysis, we find that most of the arguments that we make in the book are even more important in the time of COVID-19. For instance, we make a big call to action to embrace big data approaches, and we're seeing that in the time of COVID-19. We argue for bridging the gap between the formal and informal city. Again, in the time of COVID-19, we've seen innovative partnerships between governments and slum dwellers to battle the impacts of this pandemic. We argue for an uptake of innovative financing methods. And again, we've seen around the world, innovative financing methods have been embraced to battle the impacts of COVID-19. And therefore, we think that the book is particularly timely because not only does it provide a pathway to ameliorate the risks from climate impacts, but also other shocks and stresses such as COVID-19.