The impact of climate change takes place in cities, towns and villages. They in turn have the greatest impact on climate change. As our climate changes things are getting worse, threatening more extreme weather. If sea levels rise by just one metre, many major coastal cities will be under threat: Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, New York, Lagos, and Cairo Karachi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Dhaka, Shanghai, Osaka-Kobe, and Tokyo. To cite just some, those are mega cities with populations of more than 10 million. Never mind the many more smaller cities and island nations.

UN figures show that this year alone, 117 million people around the world have suffered from some 300 natural disasters, including devastating droughts in China and Africa, and massive flooding in Asia and Africa, costing nearly $15 billion in damages. One example – New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Everywhere the urban poor live in places no-one else would dare set foot – along beaches vulnerable to flooding, by railway, on slopes prone to landfalls, near polluted grounds. They scratch out a living in shaky structures that would be flattened the instant a hurricane hit causing untold loss in lives and destruction.

In this new urban age, the mega-cities therefore loom as giant potential flood and disaster traps. In sub-Saharan Africa, slum dwellers constitute over 70 percent of the urban populations. In other parts of the developing world that figure is a shocking 50 percent.

Our partners, including Mayors and Local Authority organizations, are deeply concerned that the developing world is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. They have sought direct access to global climate funds. The developing world needs local funding and local solutions to this global crisis.

Reduce urban poverty and we will directly offset the horrors of disasters brought on by climate change. The United Nations has calculated that one dollar invested in disaster reduction and adaptation to climate change today, can save up to seven dollars tomorrow in relief and rehabilitation costs.

Let’s make the dawn of the new urban age a bright one for our beautiful blue planet. We must have local solutions and local funding to offset global disasters.