This is a scene from New Orleans.

This is the skyline of my hometown, New Orleans.

Hundreds of New Orleans like devastations around the world.

This is Mae West, still alive at a zookeeper's home in New Orleans.

Indeed, a large share of New Orleans homeowners 60 in Orleans Parish were completely uninsured against floods. Many of those who were insured discovered that clauses in their policies barred them from collecting full benefits.

In New Orleans, the elderly and female headed households were among the most vulnerable.

On the tragedy of New Orleans, we extend our deepest condolences to the American people.

So while all that's going on, we're down in New Orleans and locations around the world.

In 2005, the world watched as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

I met a celebrity chef in New Orleans who said, No problem, I'll just time shift family dinner.

And I went to her house, and it was morning, and the morning New Orleans sun was filtering through the curtains.

Now these are examples of New Orleans rebuilding in this way, but better if others act proactively with these changes in mind.

Here's another example in New Orleans, video cameras were mesh enabled so that they could monitor crime in the downtown French Quarter.

For example, you know, in New Orleans we have Cajun Chinese food, where they serve Sichuan alligator and sweet and sour crawfish, right?

So I quit my dream job, and I moved to New Orleans, and I kept on studying how the oil spill was happening.

We note with deep regret and concern the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, causing thousands of deaths and extensive damage.

And a few weeks later, I was in New Orleans, and this beautiful, spiritual friend told me she wanted to do a healing for me.

In New Orleans, the I 10 Twin Spans, with sections knocked out in Katrina, have been rebuilt 21 feet higher to allow for greater storm surge.

Now, this area floods three to four times a year, and there's a levee behind our site similar to the ones that broke in New Orleans.

Volunteers flew in, added a whole bunch of devices, and for the next 12 months, mesh networks were the only wireless that was happening in New Orleans.

The Government that is accusing Cuba today is the one that was unable to take measures in time to prevent the disaster caused in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

And he tells this incredible story about working with a little six year old girl named Ruby Bridges, the first child to desegregate schools in the South in this case, New Orleans.

And some of you all might know, about five years ago I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely.

I refer firstly to the damage caused by hurricane Katrina in the United States, particularly in New Orleans and Louisiana, as well as the tragic events which occurred in Iraq, causing more than 900 deaths.

It could be a convulsion of nature, like the tsunami that demolished the Indonesian province of Aceh and nearby Indian Ocean Rim areas, or the storm tide that drowned New Orleans and much of Louisiana recently.

By contrast, skeptics hold that the US economy already contains the seeds of its own socio economic decline. They point to worsening income inequality, as images beamed worldwide from post hurricane New Orleans illustrated all too clearly.

Anyway OK. Katrina. Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation think hip hop and jazz.

Such a capacity will always be necessary, and few doubt its importance. When it is absent or deficient, the loss of life and livelihoods can be horrific witness Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged Haiti and New Orleans in 2005.

And I started this project alone in a garage in New Orleans, but quickly after I wanted to publish and share this information, so I made a Kickstarter, which is a crowd fundraising platform, and in about one month we fundraised 30,000 dollars.

This philosophy would benefit places like New Orleans as much as Phuket in Thailand. Indeed, while it might seem as though there would be no problem of cultural transposition in the case of Hurricane Katrina, an examination of the tragedy reveals otherwise.

Clearly, a policy of reducing CO2 emissions would have had zero consequence on Katrina s devastating impact on New Orleans, where such a disaster was long expected. Over the next half century, even large reductions in CO2 emissions would have only a negligible impact.

Such inequalities exist, to varying degrees, in all developed countries. Poorer groups fare particularly badly in the neo liberal system of the United States gaps in life expectancy in some US cities, such as New Orleans, are as large as 25 years.

Granted, rich countries have a certain advantage they benefit from generally moderate climates, with regular rainfall and relatively low risks of drought and flooding. Even so, they are not immune to water related disasters, as Hurricane Katrina s destruction of New Orleans taught us.

The Thais flew consular and embassy officials to the affected areas, aware of the sense of helplessness among those stranded far from home. America kept foreign officials from coming to the aid of their nationals in New Orleans embarrassed, perhaps, at what they would see.

Seldom do the chickens come home to roost as quickly as they have in recent years an ill conceived war, attempted on the cheap, has not brought peace to the Middle East. Now America has had to pay the price for ignoring loud warnings about the weakened levees of New Orleans.

In 2003, the most severe heat wave in living memory broke previous temperature records by a large margin and caused 70,000 deaths in Europe. In 2005, the most severe hurricane season ever witnessed in the Atlantic devastated New Orleans and broke records in terms of the number and intensity of storms.

Already, the world, under the leadership of this Organization, is doing well in its many dramatic rallies in rushing aid to victims wherever disaster occurs, such as the Indian Ocean States after the tsunami and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, here in the United States of America.

The Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has emphasized that most famines are associated not with a shortage of food, but the failure to get food to the people who need it, largely because they lack purchasing power. America, the richest country in the world, clearly had the resources to evacuate New Orleans.

Indeed, in the US, more people of color and women hold top jobs in the public and private sector than anywhere else in the world. The fact that a large black underclass remains something the recent floods in New Orleans revealed in a horrifically dramatic way is mainly the result of failing school systems.

The world has been horrified at America s response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. Four years after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, and with billions of dollars allegedly spent on preparedness for another emergency, America has shown the world that it was not prepared even for an event that came with ample warning.

NEW YORK Tacloban in the Philippines has now joined the growing list of cities including New Orleans, Bangkok, Moscow, New York, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and Port au Prince, to name just a few pummeled in recent years by climate catastrophes. Many of the world s largest cities, built on seacoasts and rivers, face the threat of rising sea levels and intensifying storms.

In the nearly six months since Hurricane Katrina destroyed half of New Orleans, many storm victims expectations of help have been dashed, creating a legacy of bitterness. That legacy may be all the more painful when we consider that many homeowners suffered unnecessarily devastating losses because of their lack of insurance or their underinsurance, often owing to the belief that they could not afford the right coverage.

When TED Senior Fellow Cesar Harada heard about the devastating effects of the BP Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, he quit his dream job and moved to New Orleans to develop a more efficient way to soak up the oil. He designed a highly maneuverable, flexible boat capable of cleaning large tracts quickly. But rather than turn a profit, he has opted to open source the design.

Last January, after the tsunami, in response to widespread calls for an early warning system, I observed that the world had been given an early warning on global warming. The rest of the world has begun to take heed, but Bush, having ignored warnings about Al Qaeda s plans prior to September 11, 2001, and having not only ignored the warnings about New Orleans levees, but actually gutted funding to shore them, has not led America to do likewise.