Nineteen one-hour recorded sessions from the Second Urban Resilience Asia Pacific (URA2) conference are now available for viewing on the IGD website.
Sixty-five experts took part in the sessions, from Australia, the Pacific, USA, Asia and Europe, from in total 14 universities, 10 thinktanks and four NGOs, as well as governments, the United Nations and business.
The sessions addressed one or more of the conference themes, which were readiness, security and transparency.
The opening session of the conference saw Serena Lillywhite, CEO, Transparency International Australia and Dr Ronak Patel, Director of urbanization and resilience at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) discuss how corrupt practices worsen disasters in the session, ‘This is not a disaster; it’s a crime scene’. For day two’s opening session, Dr Audrey Aumua, Deputy Director General at the Pacific Community and Dr Robert Glasser, Visiting Fellow, Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) debated the meaning of resilience a context of worsening climate change in the session ‘Resilience for real – what does it really take?’
Other session topics included preventing human trafficking during disasters, making schools and communities ore resilient, community capacity building for more sustainable infrastructure and localising urban resilience in the Pacific.
URAP2 was held fully online in November 2020. It was organised by the School of the Built Environment at UNSW in association with the Australia Pacific Security College at Australia National University, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, ARUP and SEEDS India.