Housing Resilience as an Urban Systems Challenge

This ONE UN event, organized by UNDRR, UNEP, UNDP, and UN-Habitat City Resilience Global Programme, positions housing not as a standalone sector but as a core urban system linking risk, climate, governance, services and social cohesion. It applies the concept of urban resilience cycle (anticipation, risk reduction, crisis response and recovery) to translate global frameworks and agencies’ actions into concrete decision points for cities and national governments. Resilient housing have become a global priority as rapid urbanization, climate change, increasingly frequent disasters, environmental degradation and socio-economic instability converge to undermine housing systems worldwide. These pressures are systemic, affecting housing structures, land governance, infrastructure networks, basic services, environmental health, institutional capacity and community well-being. Disasters affect more than 150 million people annually and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure losses, with housing disproportionately impacted as the largest component of urban infrastructure and the primary locus of vulnerability. While cities in the Global South face acute challenges linked to informality, service deficits and rapid growth, cities in the Global North are increasingly exposed due to ageing housing stock, demographic change, climate hazards and housing financialization. As risks interact across sectors, they cascade into housing as the main infrastructure of cities, amplifying displacement, service disruption and long-term vulnerability. A resilience lens reframes the housing crisis as a systemic challenge rather than a deficit of housing units. Objectives of the event: To advance a shared understanding of housing resilience as a systems challenge and to identify practical ways for cities and partners to embed disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, and service continuity into housing policies, land-use decisions, building codes, planning standards, construction practices, financing, and implementation, across the full resilience cycle (anticipation, risk reduction, crisis response, recovery and reconstruction).  The outcomes of the event will inform a joint initiative of the UN agencies (event organizers) on resilient housing which will help to create further synergies between the UN agencies and upscale the existing activities on science, policy advice and technical assistance to countries and cities.