UNDRR News

The province of Tyrol and all its 279 municipalities joined the Making Cities Resilient campaign, with the City of Lienz taking the lead. Tyrol follows an innovative approach to disaster risk reduction: Between 2010 and 2013, each municipality will hold expert-led workshops in order to prepare a comprehensive risk portfolio following a standardized methodology. Tyrol will share its extensive disaster risk reduction knowledge in the context of the campaign.

This briefing note highlights that climate change adaptation relies on the reduction and management of climate-related disaster risks and why both need to become central to development planning and investment. It incorporates evidence that illustrates how climate risks are constructed and which risks can be reduced cost effectively.

In a message from Helena Molin Valdes, Deputy Director of UNISDR, all campaign cities and partners are encouraged to submit a nomination for the UN-Sasakawa award to highlight good practice and achievements against as many of the "ten essentials" for making cities resilient as possible.

National media organizations play an important role in promoting national disaster risk reduction policies and programmes. They need to know about disaster risk reduction and to establish contact with their national disaster risk reduction representatives who can provide them with accurate and timely information. To support this, UNISDR, Thomson Reuters Foundation, UNRIC and ECHO, are organizing a two-day media training in Brussels from 15 to 16 November 2010 with ten media organizations and national platform representatives from European countries.

UNISDR is launching a call for "good practices" and lessons learned by cities/local governments in support of the "Making Cities Resilient – My City is Getting Ready!" campaign. Selected examples will be published by the end of 2011, and others will be showcased during the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction on 8-13 May 2011.

From promoting women’s empowerment in Indonesia, to teaching architects to build structures resilient against hurricanes and earthquakes, the Sasakawa Award for Disaster Reduction has helped fund innovative disaster reduction work by a range of professionals from geologists to engineers for the past 23 years. Nominations are now open for the 2011 Sasakawa Award to be given to an individual or organization for outstanding and internationally recognized action that contributes to building the resilience of nations and communities to disasters.

This year's theme: My City is Getting Ready! To mark the International Day for Disaster Reduction, the UNISDR secretariat is calling on its partners to play a more active role to protect cities against disasters. Many cities have been disrupted this year by disasters: earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and New Zealand; floods and heavy rainfalls in Pakistan, Eastern Europe, Mozambique and other parts of Africa; forest fires in Russia; and volcanic eruptions in Indonesia and Iceland. All have caused huge human suffering and economic damage. Cities have never been so at risk.

The Inter-Parliamentary Union passed a resolution, which calls on their governments to provide adequate and accessible resources to support the UN in developing a parliamentary programme on disaster risk reduction that focuses on mitigation, prevention and preparedness and UN agencies involved in providing disaster assistance. UNISDR, the UN’s agency for disaster risk reduction, is calling on international lawmakers to take action on disaster risk reduction as a means to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and adapt to climate change.

The City of Nis, Serbia, became the one-hundredth city to join the 2010-11 World Disaster Reduction Campaign “Making Cities Resilient – My City is Getting Ready!” at the city’s “Strategy for Safety Promotion” event on 30 September, a highly publicized event attended by over 40 Serbian cities. Nis joined the campaign along with 17 others.

The European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) organized a special event on European National Platforms in collaboration with UNISDR Europe, the Council of Europe European and Mediterranean Major Hazards Agreement (EUR-OPA), the European Commission and UNESCO. The goal was to discuss experiences from European National Platforms (NPs). These need to be built on national and local conditions, cultures, and structures, should reflect the needs of their constituencies and can serve as laboratories of ideas to promote innovation for DRR initiatives. The event introduced the newly established European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction, which brings together National Platforms, Hyogo Framework for Action Focal Points and regional organizations to jointly reduce vulnerabilities in Europe.