Recovery Readiness for Housing and Infrastructure Building Resilient Urban Futures

As climate change, rapid urbanisation, and compound crises intensify, disasters are causing growing damage to housing and infrastructure, leading to prolonged displacement, service disruptions, and escalating recovery costs. Yet in many cities, recovery remains largely reactive – planned and financed after disasters occur - rather than guided by preparedness, risk knowledge, and long-term resilience objectives. Recovery readiness must be built before disasters occur. It refers to the enabling environment that supports governments and cities to recover faster, safer, and more equitably following shocks. Without recovery readiness, post-disaster housing and infrastructure reconstruction risks reproducing pre-existing vulnerabilities, increasing exposure, and locking cities into repeated cycles of loss. Housing and infrastructure are central to recovery readiness. Housing recovery determines safety, dignity, tenure security, and social stability, while infrastructure systems provide services on which people are dependent —such as water, energy, and transport, thus enable people to safely inhabit and sustain their homes and access services. Recovery outcomes depend not only on the resilience of individual assets, but on the coordination of housing and infrastructure within broader urban development and service delivery systems. This event, co-organized by UNDRR, UNOPS, UN-Habitat and, with members of the International Recovery Platform, will showcase how recovery readiness for housing and infrastructure can be operationalized through risk-informed governance, planning, financing and delivery mechanisms. City and country experiences will illustrate how preparedness and coordination across institutions and sectors can transform recovery from a crisis-driven response to a catalyst for a safer, more inclusive, and disaster climate-resilient urban development.