Housing underpins economic opportunity, educational attainment, and overall well-being, yet the prospects for universal resilient housing are alarming. UN-Habitat estimates that by 2030, around 3 billion people—approximately 40% of the global population—will be living in inadequate housing. The financial implications are substantial, with the World Bank’s GFDRR warning that the failure to invest in resilient infrastructure could cost cities $314 billion annually.

Effective solutions do, in fact, already exist. The most successful are those that meet communities where they are, and prioritize simple, incremental, and scalable approaches. This talk will highlight practical, field-tested examples from Build Change’s two decades of work at the intersection of policy, finance, and technical design: from disaster-prevention programs in Colombia aimed at improving safety in informal neighborhoods, to the structural retrofitting of red-tagged homes in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, to financing climate-resilient upgrades for extreme heat in Indonesia through microfinance.

Together, these cases illustrate what it takes to move from well-intentioned plans to solutions that are viable, adopted, and implemented at scale.