UNDRR News

Directors and representatives from eight museums and organizations around the world, recently came together with government officials in the Japanese city of Ishigaki in Okinawa for the first ever World Tsunami Museum Conference.

Public Health England (PHE) has demonstrated its commitment to reducing the numbers of people affected by disasters by publishing a national review of its progress on implementation of the key international agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Vulnerable communities in Africa, the Pacific and Caribbean are now benefiting from improved early warning systems against extreme weather as part of an international drive to boost resilience and climate change adaptation.

PreventionWeb, the global knowledge sharing platform on disaster risk reduction (DRR), celebrates today its 10th anniversary. Launched in 2007 to support the work of DRR professionals, the site is managed by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).

The collapse of some state-built homes in Sunday’s earthquake in western Iran was evidence of corruption, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told a cabinet meeting today, according to state media.

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.