Globally, we have over a billion people on the planet
that live in informal settlements.
That is ultimately the planetary challenge,
how do we not leave anyone behind?
People living in informal settlements
often have very little resources,
lack of access to sanitation, lack of access to water,
very high rates of disease burden, poverty.
This is the community that lives with these burdens
of these problems, and they're finding ways to cope.
When it's high tide and heavy rain,
the floods bring in like plastics, bottles,
and all those kinds of rubbish.
Bringing them inside the community.
When the water come ups,
that water from the toilet, it's coming up.
Some of the kids here are playing on that water,
that is a big issue.
RISE is a global project,
we have 12 settlements in Indonesia,
12 settlements in Fiji.
This project will use innovative, community-driven,
nature-based methods to address
health, environment, water and sanitation issues faced
by people in the informal settlements.
We're a team of experts, we're engineers, architects,
medical doctors, social scientists,
economists, anthropologists.
We're really interested
in what does green alternative technologies
and infrastructure look like for the planet.
That could be everything from a rainwater tank
to a biofiltration system,
which would treat dirty stormwater or dirty wastewater,
to wastewater wetland systems, to overflow units,
to de-centralised sewage pumping systems.
This project is the first project in the world
that is trialling these sorts of technologies
that have been placed and designed
in partnership with communities.
We all have that same basic need
and those same basic rights.
And so what RISE is doing here,
and the work we're doing together,
is about some of those most basic things
that connect us as humans.
And we can never realise the potential of everyone
in the Pacific if we don't meet their basic needs
of sanitation, clean water supply, shelter, and safety
from some of those environmental changes we've seen.
And so I'm reminded that no matter where we live,
we have a duty to one another to see the potential
of everyone realised by making sure
those basic needs are met so that then,
everyone has hope, everyone can fulfil their potential,
everyone can fulfil the opportunities
that exist for them in this wonderful place.
As we face the challenges of climate change,
we have to build resilient communities.
And so I really commend RISE because you are factoring
that into the work that you're doing and making sure
that this project lasts and it can be replicated elsewhere.
We made a really bold decision,
instead of having a fly in expert model fly out,
that we were going to recruit the right talent locally
and work in partnership with that talent.
We have done a checkup for children.
It's last year, that's the first checkup in the community.
I worked very hard with them because I want to have
a community with no sick children.
When a child is sick, it's so scary.
We're taking stool and blood samples of all children
under the age of five throughout the project,
and we're asking the question,
prior to our intervention, what was people's health?
And post the intervention,
what's been the impact on the children's health?
We're collecting all the environmental samples,
water, soil, air quality,
what's happening in the biodiversity environment?
What's happening with the vectors, the transporters
of disease, such as mosquitoes and rats and livestock?
I've actually built two state-of-the-art laboratories,
so the bulk of the processing of our environmental
and human sample data is conducted locally.
This project's led by us, at Monash University,
but it involves a consortia of organisations
and people that are really dedicated to the mission of RISE.
We're on this journey and we need partners.
We need partners that have that global vision,
taking what we've learned and helping us scale it
to those that are most in need,
so that collectively we can leave no one behind