UNDRR News

This Saturday, from drought-stricken Mongolia to Himalayan communities threatened by glacial melt, Climatedots.org will bring people together to hold rallies and remind everyone of the extreme weather events that are happening in their communities because of climate change.

"Cities and Flooding: A Guide to Integrated Urban Flood Risk Management for the 21st Century" has just been published by the World Bank and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery.

Top UN disaster risk reduction official, Margareta Wahlström arrives in Manila Philippines tomorrow for five-day visit during which she will meet with donors, the private sector, mayors and government officials to further push for more concrete disaster reduction actions to protect more communities and assets from future disasters.

A new guide launched at the WMO HQ this week warns that urban flooding is "becoming more dangerous and more costly to manage because of the sheer size of the population exposed within urban settlements."

Nineteen year old Ien Sophorn heads a children's council in Cambodia that works with the Srei Nam Provincial Committee of Disaster Management to raise awareness on climate change adaptation.

A new study finds that 51 percent of Americans believe that extreme weather will cause a natural disaster in their own community in the next year.

Innovations in technology have made it easier in the last decade to reduce disaster risks and plan for the future. The internet combined with technologies, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), now makes it possible to better understand and communicate the social and physical complexities of disasters.

At the start of a week-long trip to Cambodia, the UN's senior official for disaster risk reduction, Margareta Wahlström, met yesterday with a 64-year-old grandmother who saved the lives of her five grandchildren during last year's heavy monsoon rains.

As she wrapped up a five-day visit to Viet Nam, Margareta Wahlström, the top UN disaster risk reduction Official, commended the Government on the ambitious Community-based Disaster Risk Management (CBDRM) Programme and the comprehensive new National Climate Change Strategy.

Yuwan Malakar has good reason to be focused and driven these days. The 30-year old environmental management major from Nepal has just had his first paper on climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR) published in one of the highly respected online journals of the Policy Studies Organization.