UNDRR News

For the second year, a High School students Summit was organised in Japan to mark World Tsunami Awareness Day. Young people from 26 countries participated.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted 20 years ago and since then we have seen an explosion of extreme weather events which have cost many lives and made the struggle to end poverty more challenging than it otherwise needs to be.

November is becoming tsunami awareness month. Tomorrow students from 21 disaster exposed countries will meet in Okinawa, Japan, for the High School Students Islands Summit.

Over the last week I have moderated discussions in Geneva and New York in which representatives from tsunami-exposed countries including Chile, Indonesia, Japan and Maldives have shared their recent experiences of this rare but most deadly of disasters.

Portugal is to formally open a National Tsunami Warning Centre on November 21, which will extend Europe’s capacity to issue tsunami alerts to its citizens. This center will monitor an area where a large earthquake followed by a big tsunami destroyed Lisbon in 1755.

The UN Deputy Secretary-General Ms. Amina J. Mohammed opened a high-level panel discussion in New York this week as part of the build up to World Tsunami Awareness Day on November 5.

Czech model and entrepreneur Petra Nemcova was yesterday officially recognized by Robert Glasser, Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction as World Tsunami Awareness Advocate in a ceremony held at the Japan Society in New York.

A tsunami survivor who has dedicated herself to building and supporting safe schools in disaster zones has been appointed as the UN’s first World Tsunami Awareness Advocate by Mr. Robert Glasser, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction.

A review of tsunami hazards over the last 400 years highlights “seismic gaps” or locations in the Pacific region where there may be complacency about the tsunami threat following long periods of seismic inactivity.

Nine years ago, scientists from the UK, Europe and the USA met in London to discuss a new and unexpected way that global warming might be threatening the planet.