UN Resident Coordinator Jean Kamau's remarks at the opening of the 'Making Cities Resilient 2030' workshop

It is truly a pleasure to be here with you today as we open this Making Cities Resilient 2030 workshop for Georgetown.

Georgetown is a city shaped by its climate. A coastal capital, much of it below sea level, where water has always shaped daily life. Georgetown knows what it means to live with flooding, heavy rainfall, and rising seas. It also knows what it means to live with heat—when the hot season settles over the city, placing pressure on people, services, and urban systems. But Georgetown also knows the value of planning ahead, of working together, and of learning through experience.

That context is why this workshop matters.

Over the next two days, you will be taking a closer look at how risk and resilience are being addressed in Georgetown today, what capacities already exist, where challenges persist, and how local action can be strengthened going forward. The focus is not abstract. It is practical, local, and grounded in the realities of the city.

I want to begin by recognizing the Georgetown City Council for its participation in the Making Cities Resilient 2030 Initiative. This is an opportunity to step back, take stock, and engage openly in how resilience is planned and coordinated at the city level. Importantly, the discussions and assessments that take place here will help inform the development of a Local Governance Plan for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience for Georgetown, grounded in the city’s specific risk profile and institutional context.

I would also like to acknowledge and encourage the continued leadership of the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development and the Civil Defence Commission, whose roles are central to ensuring that resilience efforts translate into real protections for people, infrastructure, and livelihoods.

At the same time, we all know that urban resilience is built across many systems. It involves how cities are planned, how infrastructure is maintained, how services are delivered, how communities are engaged, and how institutions work together. It depends on cooperation across government, civil society, the private sector, and technical partners. The range of actors gathered here reflects that shared responsibility.

This emphasis on local, coordinated action sits at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. While the SDGs are global in scope, progress is realized locally. In fact, at least 65 percent of SDG targets are linked to the work and mandates of local governments. This makes localization essential and underscores the need for whole‑of‑government and whole‑of‑society approaches to sustainable development.

Localizing the SDGs means anchoring global goals in local realities. It means placing communities at the centre of development action, strengthening partnerships across levels of governance, and ensuring that local authorities have the space, capacity, and resources to respond to local needs and priorities.

This is where Making Cities Resilient 2030 plays an important role.

MCR2030 is one of the ways the United Nations works with partners to support the localization of sustainable development. Rooted in SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, and aligned with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, it is a global partnership led by UNDRR to strengthen disaster risk reduction and resilience at the local level. Through advocacy, knowledge sharing, and city‑to‑city learning, MCR2030 supports cities, towns, districts, and villages to assess risk, identify gaps, and develop local DRR and resilience strategies that reflect their specific contexts.

Here in Guyana, this journey did not begin today.

Last year, MCR2030 engagement began in Lethem, a town with a very different context and hazard profile, including riverine flooding, drought, extreme heat, and wildfires. That experience reinforced an important lesson: resilience looks different in different places, and diverse local contexts strengthen national learning. Georgetown now builds on that momentum, bringing the perspective of a coastal capital, an economic hub, and a densely populated urban centre where hazard, exposure, and vulnerability intersect in complex ways.

This work also connects closely with Guyana’s progress under the Early Warnings for All initiative. The approval of the national Implementation Roadmap marked a critical step toward strengthening multi‑hazard early warning systems to protect lives, livelihoods, and assets. As with resilience more broadly, the effectiveness of early warning systems depends on how well national frameworks translate into local action: how information reaches people, how it is understood, and how it supports timely response.

The discussions you will have here over the next two days contribute directly to strengthening that connection between national systems and local implementation.

Ultimately, this workshop is not just about frameworks or assessments. It is about ownership. Ownership of risk. Ownership of solutions. And ownership of Georgetown’s resilience pathway.

Over these two days, I encourage open exchange, honest reflection, and practical thinking. The strength of MCR2030 lies not in the tools it offers, but in the partnerships it enables, and in the collective ambition of those in the room.

Thank you for being part of this process, and I wish you a productive workshop.