Last week, United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and ICLEI jointly hosted a webinar that focused on how lessons learnt during disasters had better equipped cities to deal with the COVID-19. This webinar focused on the past six months in Australia and the multiple, cascading disasters that have been experienced from fires, floods to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our Regional Director, Steve Gawler participated as one of the guest speakers in this webinar.

Other speakers included:

• Sioux Campbell, Acting Local Disaster Coordinator, Cairns Regional Council, Queensland, Australia

• Pauline Koritsa, General Manager Business and Community Services, City of West Torrens, South Australia

• Stuart McConnell, General Manager Bushfire Recovery, East Gippsland Shire Council, Victoria, Australia

This webinar was attended by 240+ active participants including city representatives and urban practitioners who found this exercise useful to improve their resilience strategies and recover better and faster from disasters. Many interesting questions were raised in the webinar, few of which included time taken by local governments to prepare response plans to COVID-19 and the time it took to execute them.