Dr Ioana Creitaru leads UNDP's global work on disaster early warning and preparedness and manages Get Airports Ready for Disaster (GARD), its long-running airport-readiness partnership with DHL Group. 

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The Middle East is in the midst of a major transformation of its aviation sector. Across the Gulf, new airports and large-scale expansions are being developed alongside ambitions to strengthen the region's position in global travel, trade and logistics. The scale of investment is reshaping the role airports play in the region and their connections with the wider world. 

The expansion is unfolding against a backdrop of natural hazards, climate pressures and other risks. For airports that increasingly sit at the center of international movement, these conditions add another dimension to how their future is being planned. 

UNDP's Get Airports Ready for Disaster (GARD) initiative, in partnership with DHL Group, has spent more than a decade working with airports around the world on preparedness. Its experience offers a practical perspective as the region's aviation ambitions continue to grow. 

In this exclusive conversation with Tech Revolt, Dr Ioana Creitaru reflects on the evolution of GARD, the role emerging technologies could play in disaster preparedness, and the questions the Middle East's aviation expansion will need to address as it looks ahead. 

1. At UNDP, you are the global manager of the Get Airports Ready for Disasters – GARD, in partnership with DHL Group. GARD supported over 70 airports across 30 countries. What does it actually mean for an airport to be 'ready' for a disaster? 

Readiness means an airport can absorb a sudden surge in humanitarian aid triggered by a crisis situation without itself becoming the bottleneck in the response. When a major disaster strikes, the nearest international airport can face something like a threefold jump in flights, cargo and people almost overnight: relief teams, emergency supplies, search-and-rescue units, returning nationals, journalists. If the airport cannot cope, the aid that is meant to save lives simply backs up on the tarmac, and those first hours, when help matters most, are lost. 

So being “ready” is about knowing your surge capacity across the entire chain and having a plan to manage it. That means looking honestly at every link: runway and apron slots, terminal space, ground handling and warehousing, fuel, water and power, customs and immigration rules for humanitarian cargo and responders, and the onward distribution of aid once it leaves the perimeter. The bottlenecks almost always sit between those links, which is why readiness is as much about coordination as it is about capacity. 

What I want people to take away is that preparedness is less about new infrastructure than about planning, trained people and relationships agreed before the crisis rather than improvised during it. In GARD terms that is very practical. An airport takes a hard-headed look at how much extra traffic it could really absorb, pinpoints exactly where it would seize up, and comes away with an action plan that has been pressure-tested and signed up to by every agency with a role to play. An airport is truly “ready” when that plan exists, people have rehearsed it, and everyone already knows their part before the first relief flight is on approach.  

2. What is one lesson from this programme that has changed how you approach airport preparedness? 

The biggest lesson is that preparedness is not achieved in a workshop: it is sustained in the months and years after it. Early in my time with the programme, success could look like a well-run week and a polished action plan that everyone signed off on. But a plan only matters if someone actually acts on it, and that depends on financing, staff time and follow-up coordination that only materialise long after the trainers have flown home.  

That lesson is built into how the programme works. You can see it in the way GARD Plus is used: going back a year or two after the first workshop to check how much of the plan has actually been put into practice, where things have stalled, and what still needs a push. And it is why the whole model has tilted toward stronger national ownership, with in-country partners increasingly driving the process rather than simply receiving it. In Peru and the Philippines, for instance, GARD has been delivered in several airports across each country, and national institutions there are taking a growing role in leading and sustaining the work alongside the partners. 

The question I keep asking is no longer “was this good workshop?” but “who owns this, who funds it, and will it still be running when we are not in the room?” Making airport readiness a permanent part of national preparedness processes is ultimately what makes it last. This requires routine institutional practice rather than a one-off intervention. The most successful GARD champion countries are the ones that no longer need us. 

3. What determines whether cooperation between governments, airports and private-sector partners delivers lasting results? 

What makes cooperation like this deliver lasting results, rather than a short burst of activity, comes down to four things in my experience. 

The first is genuine public-sector ownership. The most durable results come when government institutions treat the action plan as their own and actively drive it. In the Kingdom of Bahrain, three national bodies - the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Transportation and Telecommunications, and Bahrain Airport Company - jointly led the effort that made Bahrain International Airport the first in the GCC to complete GARD. 

The second is complementary roles: each partner doing what it does best rather than duplicating the others. The private sector brings expertise that governments rarely hold in-house: DHL Group contributes decades of logistics, cargo and customs know-how through a global network of specially trained volunteer experts. As the international partner, UNDP brings its disaster risk reduction expertise, its convening power across government and the wider UN system, and its wider mandate to support sustainable development. And the public side brings the mandate, the regulatory authority and the national emergency management system. GARD works precisely because those strengths are stitched together instead of competing. 

The third is getting the right people into the same room. Readiness fails in the gaps between functions, so you need air traffic control, ground handling, cargo, customs, immigration, security and emergency management all working the same problem together. Many of them meet for the first time at a GARD workshop. That relationship, built before a crisis rather than during one, is a valuable contribution this programme brings. 

And finally, follow-through and trust. Naming who owns each action, returning to check on progress, and building relationships in advance are what turn a successful project into simply the way a country does airport preparedness. Lasting results arrive at the moment it stops being “the UNDP–DHL Group programme” and becomes theirs. 

4. You have been exploring practical applications of AI in your domain of expertise. Where do you see AI having the most immediate impact as far as preparedness is concerned? 

This is an area I have been actively exploring, and much of it connects directly to the preparedness work at the heart of GARD. I see AI making its most immediate difference in three areas: risk anticipation, early warning, and recovery preparedness.  

The first is risk anticipation: helping us see risk coming and act on it before it becomes crisis. AI is very good at pulling together many different streams of data, like climate and environmental indicators, demographic data, satellite and night-light imagery, even text and social media into a dynamic picture of where risk is concentrating and who is most exposed. That lets authorities plan around the most vulnerable communities rather than treating everywhere as equally at risk. 

Secondly, the clearest immediate gains are in early warning. Machine learning applied to satellite imagery, weather and sensor networks and hydrological data can sharpen forecasts and extend lead times for hazards like floods, cyclones, droughts and heatwaves. But the real value is not the forecast itself. Instead, it is turning it into earlier action, through pre-agreed triggers that release funding and set preparations in motion before a hazard materializes into a disaster rather than after it. 

Then there is recovery preparedness: being ready to rebuild before disaster even strikes. Too often, planning for recovery only begins once the damage is done, but AI makes it possible to do it in advance, modelling how different hazards would affect homes, services and livelihoods and stress-testing recovery and financing options so that a credible plan is ready before it is needed. When a disaster does hit, the same tools speed up the actual recovery process: computer vision on satellite imagery can estimate damage across wide areas in hours rather than weeks and, combined with socio-economic data, help direct reconstruction toward the hardest-hit and most vulnerable communities from the very first days.  

The important caveat is that none of this delivers unless it is built on data people trust, embedded in national systems and local realities, and deployed responsibly, with genuine attention to bias, inclusion and the digital divide, so the technology does not simply serve the already well-served.  

5. Looking at the Arab States region, what preparedness challenge deserves more attention as the region's aviation sector continues to expand? 

The Arab States region, and particularly the GCC, is building aviation capacity at a remarkable pace: new mega-hubs, expanded airports, record passenger and cargo traffic. My concern is that commercial scale is being designed in from day one, while the humanitarian role these airports could play is not always designed in alongside it. A big, modern, highly efficient airport is not automatically a disaster- or a crisis-ready one; those are two different capabilities. 

So the challenge I would flag is to build humanitarian surge capability into that growth from the start, rather than trying to retrofit it later. It is far cheaper and far more effective to bake in the regulatory fast-tracks for humanitarian cargo, the warehousing, and the customs and immigration arrangements while terminals and procedures are still on the drawing board than to bolt them on once everything is built and already operating at capacity. 

There is also a regional dimension that deserves more attention. The Gulf sits astride some of the world's busiest logistics corridors, which makes its airports natural transit hubs for crises across the wider region; not only for disasters at home. Bahrain's GARD workshop tested exactly this: a scenario in which the airport functions as a transit hub for relief destined for a disaster-affected third country. That cross-border lifeline role needs agreements, protocols and rehearsal in advance. 

If there is one thread running through all of this, it is that preparedness is moving from a reactive exercise toward something anticipatory, nationally owned and increasingly data-driven. Airports sit at the centre of that shift, because they are where a disaster response either succeeds or stalls in its first hours. In this region and everywhere else the task ahead is to make readiness routine before the next crisis tests it, rather than improvising once it has already arrived. 

What the next phase of aviation will require 

The Middle East's aviation ambitions are likely to keep reshaping the region for years to come. The airports emerging from this investment will become part of an infrastructure network with an importance that extends well beyond the aviation sector itself. 

For airport operators and policymakers, the decisions made during this period of expansion will help define how these hubs serve the region in the future. Building with a wider view of what airports may be called upon to do can ensure that the infrastructure being developed today remains fit for a changing and increasingly interconnected region. 

Dr Ioana Creitaru will be a speaker at Intersec Saudi Arabia 2026, taking place 16–18 November 2026 at the Riyadh Front Exhibition & Conference Center in Riyadh. 

About Ioana Creitaru 

Dr Ioana Creitaru is a senior advisor in climate and disaster resilience with more than 17 years of leadership experience across the United Nations system. Based in Geneva, she leads the UNDP’s global portfolio on disaster early warning and preparedness. She serves as UNDP's global manager of Get Airports Ready for Disaster (GARD), the flagship public-private partnership between UNDP and DHL Group that has strengthened airport disaster readiness in over 70 airports across 30 countries since 2009. A crisis response and recovery advisor, she has been deployed in crisis and post-crisis settings including in eastern Afghanistan for the 2025 earthquakes, the in Egypt for the Gaza crisis response in 2024, the in Papua New Guinea for the 2024 landslides and in Moldova for the Ukraine refugee crisis in 2022. 

A longstanding advocate for women’s leadership in disaster and crisis management and a UNDP Gender Equality Champion, Dr Ioana Creitaru holds a PhD from the Geneva Graduate Institute for research on securitization, climate change and disaster response. 

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