UNDRR News

A leading member of UNISDR’s global private sector partnership is rehousing 1,000 families badly affected by Typhoon Haiyan in new communities that are designed to have soul and safety in equal measure.

Bangkok/Geneva, 13 March 2014 – Some 3,000 experts including government ministers from 50 Asian countries are to meet in Bangkok, to discuss the disaster-prone region’s final inputs into a new global agreement on disaster risk reduction to replace the existing Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA)...

Three years on, the pain has not diminished. Today, the whole of Japan is remembering the day of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The confirmed death toll stands at 15,884 with 2,633 missing and 267,000 people are living as evacuees.

An inclusive recovery effort in the aftermath of the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines is providing a global example of how to build community resilience ahead of next year’s World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.

The Philippines Climate Change Commissioner, Yeb Saño, believes the post-2015 international framework for disaster risk reduction will grasp the opportunity to “think and act differently”.

The Mayor of the worst-hit city of the Typhoon Haiyan disaster believes the city’s future prosperity depends on “transformational development” that rebuilds communities and not just houses.

The Philippines today launched a nationwide “Science for Safer Communities” so that more lives are saved through better early warning and understanding of disaster risk.

For the third time in thirty years, Japan is preparing to host a World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.

UNISDR’s Local Government Self-Assessment Tool (LGSAT) is an effective tool to assess a city’s institutional capacity to build resilience, a new report has found. The study said the LGSAT opened up dialogue and enabled the establishment of baseline data for the Ten Essentials of UNISDR’s Making Cities Resilient Campaign “that can be used to track progress as the cities continue to build disaster and climate resilience”. The report, titled ‘Assessing City Resilience: Lessons from using the UNISDR Local Government Self-Assessment Tool in Thailand and Vietnam’, said the LGSAT enabled local discussions to take place within an internationally-applied framework of common issues. The study looked at four cities – Hue and Lao Cai, in Vietnam, and Udon Thani and Hat Yai, in Thailand – and identified gaps between policy and practice, and between planning and implementation.

The Philippines’ national budget for 2014 has ensured dedicated funding for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation programmes.