UNDRR News

Over 40 officials from China, Africa and the United Nations are taking part in a three-day “Sino-African High-Level Seminar on Drought Risk Reduction” which is calling for drought risk reduction to be on the agenda of the next year’s Sino-African Summit for Development Cooperation.

In a further sign that Africa is mobilizing for its voice to be heard at the COP17 negotiations in Durban, the Mayors of major cities and chairmen of local governments across West Africa met this week in Lagos, Nigeria, to endorse and sign the African Mayors Climate Change Declaration.

At the opening of the General Debate of the 66th session of the UN General Assembly yesterday, incoming Assembly President Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser identified disaster prevention as one of the key issues that will “help frame our work this session”.

Six months after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Margareta Wahlström, the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction Chief, has met with Mayor Jin Sato of Minami-Sanriku town which lost 558 people in the tragedy. The total population of the town was 17,300 before the disaster and 343 are still unaccounted for.

The UN-EU Partnerships Report for 2010 highlights the increasingly important role of disaster risk reduction in the joint activities of the United Nations and the European Union. The report was released following the opening of the 66th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations on 13 September.

Seismic risk has taken on a different meaning this week with the trial opening in Italy of six scientists charged with failing to predict the L’Aquila earthquake that killed 309 people in 2009 and left 70,000 people homeless. The scientists and one official are charged with manslaughter.

Last Friday over 50 African Ministers of the Environment attending the Fourth Special Session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) adopted a declaration endorsing an ‘African Common Position’ as the basis for negotiations by African States at the next round of UN Climate Change negotiations (COP17) to be held in Durban, South Africa starting 17 November.

The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, today drew attention to the “data-collection gap” which is preventing governments from effectively determining risk levels with his launch of the Fourth report of the MDG Gap Task Force in New York.

The Cancun-agreed Green Climate Fund which aims to provide US$100 billion per annum by 2020 to assist developing countries in financing adaptation, was a hot topic for discussion at today’s Fourth Special Session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN).

The report "Natural Hazards, and Unnatural Disasters: the Economics of Effective Prevention", prepared by the World Bank in partnership with the United Nations and funded by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, concludes that natural hazards often turn into disasters as a result of poor policies and practices, and examines ways to make prevention cost-effective.