Climate and Disaster Resilience at the Household Level Recording

Resilient households form the basis for ensuring resilient communities and cities. Without resilience at the household level, the urban poor cannot be protected from climate change and disaster-related risks. Building climate and disaster resilience involve multidimensional issues requiring various policy and financial investments on social protection, adequate and resilient housing, access to essential health services, and sustainable livelihoods.

Sheela Patel

Sheela Patel is the founder Director of the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), an NGO that supports community organizations of the urban poor to access secure housing and basic amenities and seek their right to the city. She is also a founder member and former Chair of the Board of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), an international network of urban poor federations in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Jaya Singh Verma

Jaya Singh Verma is presently Policy Advisor with the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office working with the Indo-Pacific Regional Team. She is the Senior Responsible Officer for the Managing Climate Risks for the Urban Poor (MCRUP) Programme. She has over 20 years of development experience including with DFID, international NGO and as an academic. She has led partnerships and managed multi-sectoral program and policy approaches in India, Asia regional, Africa, and established partnerships for innovations and lesson sharing as an acting head of Global Partnerships.

Opening Session Recording

Rapid urbanization in Asia and the Pacific calls for increased actions in climate-resilient urban development given the inordinate demands that it places on cities for improved planning, increased investments in infrastructure, efficient delivery of services, and constant innovation to leverage evolving opportunities.

[VIDEO] Women on the Move: Transforming Transport in Asia—GIZ

Transport is largely still seen as a field for men, with only ~20% of the workforce being women despite knowledge that women make up half of the population and have different travel patterns and considerations. This underrepresentation inevitably leads to gaps in how mobility services are delivered – an issue we would like to tackle by ensuring that gender is mainstreamed in our work.

[VIDEO] Public Participation and Citizen Engagement for Urban Development—Maptionnaire

The possibilities of citizen participation in urban planning have increased tremendously through digitalization. While public participation and community engagement have become widely accepted approaches to enhance the democratic aims of community and urban development, challenges still remain.In this workshop, we discuss our experiences of online community engagement from the Nordic perspective, drawing from our decade-long journey as the female founders of Maptionnaire, one of the leading PPGIS application development platforms on the market.

Shiju Varghese

Shiju Varghese is a transformational leader and gifted P&L owner seasoned in diverse Asia technology markets operating in a global paradigm. Passionate about creating and growing teams of performers who drive business results, he champions data-driven decision making, process excellence and innovation and gains real excitement in designing and taking to market compelling services and business propositions that generate revenue and build value.

Nengshi Zheng

Nengshi Zheng is an independent consultant, a member of Hunan provincial sponge city professional committee and an expert in the municipal engineering expert pool of Changsha City, PRC. He graduated from Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, with a master’s degree in landscape and open-space planning. He has worked at the Atelier Dreiseitl (later as Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl) as water engineer and landscape architect on international interdisciplinary projects and later as branch manager of Wasser Hannover GmbH in China.