In 2013, an estimated one million Filipinos were plunged into poverty after Typhoon Haiyan sapped $12.9 billion from the national economy and destroyed over a million homes.

No sooner had the 2010 Cyclone Aila devastated coastal areas of Bangladesh than unemployment and poverty levels surged 49 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

Economic strains facing Guatemala after Hurricane Stan in 2005 forced 7.3 percent of affected families to send children to work instead of school. 

Whenever disaster strikes, it leaves more than just a trail of devastation—it also leaves communities further in the grip of poverty.

And yet, when we hear of natural disasters today, their financial cost—that is, the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production—is what catches the headlines. New research, however, suggests that reducing natural disasters to their monetary impact does not paint the whole picture. In fact, it distorts it.

That’s because a simple price tag represents only the losses suffered by people wealthy enough to have something to lose in the first place. It fails to account for the crushing impact of disasters on the world’s poor, who suffer much more in relative terms than wealthier people.

Through this lens, a new report released by the World Bank and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), warns that natural disasters are a greater impediment to ending global poverty than previously understood. Launched this week at COP22, the report, Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters underscores the urgency for climate-smart policies that better protect the world’s most vulnerable. 

  Jim Yong Kim, World Bank Group President

Compared to their wealthier counterparts, poor people are more likely to live in fragile housing in disaster-prone areas, and work in sectors dangerously susceptible to extreme weather events, like farming and agriculture. They also receive much less government and community support for recovery. The result: the impact of a storm, flood, drought or earthquake is more than twice as significant for poor people than anyone else.

For example, when unprecedented floods affected Mumbai in 2005, poor people lost 60 percent more than their richer neighbors—and when poor people lose the little they have, there are immediate and sometimes irreversible consequences for their health. In Ecuador, poor children exposed in utero to El Niño flooding in 1997-1998 were found to have relatively lower birthweights, shorter statures, and impaired cognitive abilities.

Proposing a new measure for assessing disaster-related damages—one that factors in the unequal burden on the poor—Unbreakable shows that natural disasters currently cost the global economy $520 billion (60 percent more than is usually reported) and force some 26 million people into poverty every year.

But there is hope. Governments can prevent millions of people from falling into extreme poverty by enacting measures that better protect the poor from natural disasters.

The report proposes a “resilience policy” package that would help poor people cope with the consequences of adverse weather and other extreme natural events. This includes early warning systems, improved access to personal banking, insurance policies, and social protection systems (like cash transfers and public works programs) that could help people better respond to and recover from shocks. Unbreakable also calls on governments to make critical investments in infrastructure, dikes, and other means of controlling water levels, and develop appropriate land-use policies and building regulations. These efforts must be specifically targeted to protect the poorest and most vulnerable citizens, not just those with higher-value assets.

The report assesses the expected benefits from these policies in 117 countries. If Angola, for example, were to introduce scalable safety nets to cover its poorest citizens, the government would see gains equaling $160 million a year. Globally, these measures combined would help countries and communities save $100 billion a year and reduce the overall impact of disasters on well-being by 20 percent.

“Countries are enduring a growing number of unexpected shocks as a result of climate change,” said Stephane Hallegatte, a GFDRR lead economist and lead author of the report. “Poor people need social and financial protection from disasters that cannot be avoided. With risk policies in place that we know to be effective, we have the opportunity to prevent millions of people from falling into poverty.”

Efforts to build poor people’s resilience are already gaining ground, the report shows. Only last month, thanks to an innovative insurance program, Haiti, Barbados, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines received a payout of $29 million in support of recovery efforts after suffering the effects of Hurricane Matthew.

Unbreakable is a roadmap to help countries better adapt to climate change, and boost the resilience and prosperity of their most vulnerable citizens. By equipping the most vulnerable with the means to cope, rebuild and rebound we can increase the chance for millions to stay out of extreme poverty. 

Cities are like magnets. Without a better model for growth, people will still come – but they will live in awful conditions. This year’s Pritzker prize-winning architect presents his legal, financial and design roadmap to a new urban reality.

In Quito as many as 45,000 people have gathered for Habitat III, the global UN summit which, every 20 years, resets the world’s urban agenda.

Why should we care? Well, to start with, in the next 20 years, we will witness more than two billion more people moving to cities. Depending on what we do to accommodate them, this could be good – or very bad – news.

It’s good news because people are demonstrably better off in cities than outside them. For the poor, cities are efficient vehicles to satisfy basic needs. Having people in a concentrated space makes the implementation of public policies more effective (think of access to sanitation, and the consequences for reducing child mortality and epidemic disease).

For the middle class, meanwhile, cities are a concentration of opportunities for jobs, education, healthcare and even recreation. They offer the promise of social mobility. And for a certain elite, cities are a powerful vehicle to create wealth; their critical mass generates the appropriate environment for knowledge creation and prosperity in the broadest sense of the word.

In short, cities are like magnets, with the potential to take care of everything from the most basic needs to the most intangible desires.

Now for the bad news, which we could call the “3S menace”. The scale and speed of this global urbanisation, and the scarcity of means with which we must respond to it, has no precedents in human history.

Of the three billion urban dwellers today, one billion live below the poverty line. In two decades’ time, five billion people will be in cities, with two billion of them below the poverty line.

To accommodate such growth humanely, we would need to build a city of one million people every week, spending no more than $10,000 per family. If we don’t solve this equation, it’s not that people will stop coming to cities; they will still come, but they will live in awful conditions.

What’s at stake here is not just poverty but inequality too. Cities express in a very concrete and direct way the distance between the haves and have-nots.

Urban inequalities are often reflected in brutal ways – from the distance people must travel to work every day, to the lack of quality public spaces, urban amenities and civic services. No wonder so much anger and resentment is accumulated in the peripheries.

Of course, this is problem is not exclusive to developing countries. Rich countries, despite having solved all their basic needs, experience a similar accumulation of social pressure as if it was a ticking time bomb.

A way to grow

To add one more level of complexity to the phenomenon of urbanisation, even if we do eventually find a way to build for that extra million people each week, we will go into environmental crisis, such is the carbon footprint of today’s construction process.

This would not only be a “green” problem, but a major security threat too. According to a report by the US defence department, the next conflicts, wars and terrorist threats will be triggered by climate change.

There is a one-to-one correlation between zones of military conflict and a global map of water drought. This not only creates problems in the afflicted countries but also migrations towards less-affected areas, adding to the social pressure in the countries of destination too.

These are the kind of challenges that needed to be addressed at Habitat III. Fortunately, an appeal by Dr Joan Clos, the executive director of UN Habitat appointed by Ban Ki Moon to guide the event, already carries a promising approach.

Clos’s framing of the problem can be synthesised like this: we need to invert the way we view the relationship between economic development and good cities.

The current approach is: first a country creates wealth. Once that is achieved, good cities will follow automatically, becoming a kind of passive outcome of economic development.

Clos’s task has instead been to convince the world’s mayors (and development experts, and ministers of finance) that good cities can be a source of development, rather than the other way around. This reframing, and what results from it, can be summarised as follows …

Lesson 1: good cities may be the source, instead of the passive outcome, of economic development

For this inversion of the paradigm to take place, however, you need three things: the right rule of law, the right financial plan and the right design. Imagine the mayor of City X in a rather poor country (which is, of course, where the majority of future urbanisation will take place). He or she may look out of their window and see an informal settlement growing by the hour.

Regarding the rule of law: in this settlement, property rights are unclear, so the shacks that actually cost quite a bit of money cannot have a “parallel life as capital”, as the economist Hernando de Soto puts it. Regarding the financing: there is only one source – people’s own resources. And regarding design: there is no access to sanitation, so no clean water nor sewerage system.

There is no creation of value here, merely expense. The proportion between public and private space in such spontaneous urbanisation is invariably less than 1:10. Evidence shows that only when this ratio is close to 1:1 can one expect some value gain for residents (Manhattan is the ultimate example of this). . In such cases, each individual action not only gains individual value but also adds to the common good. In a slum, individual interventions, however well intentioned, cannot guarantee that.

Lesson 2: the scarcest resource in cities is not money, but coordination

There is one good side to the informality of the city growing outside the mayor’s window. Since it is spontaneous, there is no zoning regulation (a kind of fundamental truth of planning). Instead, we can expect a richly mixed fledgling city, where residential, businesses, retail services and productive activities all coexist together.

The interior of a ‘half house’ by Aravena, before and after. Photograph: Tadeuz Jalocha
 

Lesson 3: a certain urban intensity is desirable
Now our mayor ponders: what can I do with an annual budget of just $6 per inhabitant to invest in this new city? Once again, this financial plan has only one source: a state with scarce resources. Such a limited budget may force our mayor to transform agricultural land into urban land, adding to the already underserved peripheries and expanding the sprawl.

The mayor will likely devote only a very small area to public space (as little as 20%) so more land can be dedicated to accommodating the mass of people that are pressing to be given a house. Zoning regulations will very likely be applied, resulting in a separation of functions and a very low urban intensity. Finally, since the tight budget won’t allow to build “middle-class standard” housing units, evidence shows that as much as 50% of the built environment will be self-built all the same (despite, not thanks to, the design of the units).

Facing this adverse scenario, a private real-estate developer may approach the mayor of City X and request, say, 20 hectares of land to build a housing project. And the mayor, spotting the opportunity for someone else to take care of his housing headache, may make a counter-offer: that the project will only be approved on the condition the developer actually takes 40 hectares of land.

Naturally the developer will agree, then proceed as usual: property rights will be secured and zoning regulations complied with, resulting in low urban intensity. The financing plan will still depend on one source – this time private capital, which will look for a two-digit return in a short period of time.

Such a miserly way of investing will dedicate as little area as possible to public space (again, as little as 20%) in order to maximise the area that can be sold. The developer may add some meandering streets to make the urban footprint more appealing, and some decoration to the tiny units. But design-wise, the contribution of the private market will be like putting lipstick on a gorilla.

So, what to do? Perhaps the mayor of City X has come to Quito looking for clues, ideas and tips. And one could be to join up the forces of the (poor) state and the (mediocre) developer, without expecting either of them to change their nature.

Rather than giving away a whole slab of land as a closed package, the mayor could instead partition the area the developer is asking for, then create reserves of public space between the lots: ecological corridors with a civic standard the developer would never be incentivised to deliver.

The developer would then follow his usual model, adding a further 20% of public space – so that, overall, the project now possesses a much more liveable 40% of public space.

For this scheme, the financial plan now has two sources: state funding, to take care of the public space and eventually some urban services too, and private funding, which looks after the urbanisation and some public space as well. Such a development will still have low urban intensity, but the higher ratio of public space may open it up to some value gain in future.

The crucial point here is to secure the “void” of the future city. The quality of its residents’ future mobility, for example, will depend on the quality of the space we reserve in between the buildings.

Lesson 4: in a “good” city, what is not built is more important than what is

An even greater disruption from the predictable, mediocre norm would be for the state and the market to join forces with people’s own resources.

To allow the inclusion of a third source in the financial plan, the design has to be an open one. The starting point would be the same as the previous one: public space reserved between the conventional real estate. But the developer should then be required leave 50% of the lots not built.

In such a scheme, these voids are intended to channel people’s own initiative – and, consequently, their resources. Property rights will be secured, but the “porosity” of the structures allows them to be customised, and leaves room for a higher level of urban intensity in the future. The process of reaching a middle-class standard through self-construction will happen thanks to the design, not despite of it.

Lesson 5: people’s own building capacity is part of the solution, not the problem

As Habitat III draws to a close this week, I wonder whether by 2036, when the next Habitat conference comes around, Clos’s “paradigm shift” will have gained traction among decision-makers. I hope the real-estate world will have moved from its current, standard two-digit return to a (fair enough) one-digit return which prioritises predictability over profitability in the way developers invest in cities.

This blog post was originally posted on the Guardian.

The United Nations Environmental Youth Action Initiative (UNEYAI Liberia) in collaboration with the LBS Community leadership, were able to successfully implement the  Community Cleanup and Solid Waste Management (CC-SWM) Project in the LBS Community on Saturday, October 1, 2016, with over ten (10) community volunteers and some community leaders who participated in our Pre-Training and Community Cleanup exercises on October 1, 2016.

UNEYAI Liberia Country Director, Ms. Sangaye Kweegbo was able to gave an overview of UNEYAI Liberia establishment, objectives, leadership, and the organization thematic areas of work, while Mr. Thomas P. Mitchell, Program Director of UNEYAI Liberia elaborated on the organization programs that are designed, with more emphasis on the Community Cleanup and Solid Waste Management (CC-SWM) Project.

The Community Cleanup and Solid Waste Management (CC-SWM) Project is a community based environmental campaign that inspires and empowers communities from every corner to clean up and conserve their environment. The LBS Community was our first target and we hope to implement the CC-SWM Project into other affected communities