UNISDR presents AGREED, an informative bimestrial bulletin created for parliamentarians interested in being connected with the Disaster Risk Reduction community.
Andrew Thomspon, former Global Catastrophe Risk & Insurance practice manager at Arup, answers some key questions about how to improve resilience and earthquake risk reduction worldwide. In this short interview, he underlines the importance of "getting knowledge about individual risks into the hands of people that can do something about it", so marginally referring to individual resilience, understandable and accessible risk information, open data.
This report presents the 2014 FM Global Resilience Index, which provides an annual ranking of 130 countries according to their business resilience to supply chain disruption through an equally-weighted composite of nine core variables. Rankings are provided for the overall composite index and for each of its component factors: economic, risk quality and supply chain. The risk quality factor consists of a country's exposure to natural hazards, the quality of its natural hazard risk management and the quality of its fire risk management.
"About 80 percent of the investment in a city typically comes from the private sector, so the private sector does have a stake in making cities more resilient. We spend a great deal of effort to respond to natural disasters, but we have not done very well as a society to plan response actions to mitigate the impacts of natural disasters," said Dale Sands, vice chair of the United Nations’ Private Sector Advisory Group for the International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction, as reported by Greenbiz. Sands was talking earlier this year at a Sustainable Business Fridays conversation held by the Bard MBA in Sustainability program, based in New York City. “It’s hard to be sustainable if you are not resilient. These two aspects are very interrelated,” he added. Sands has spearheaded private sector engagement to improve disaster resilience. He led AECOM’s collaboration with PSAG member IBM to develop a Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities to evaluate degrees of preparedness for natural disasters, in connection with the UN’s Ten Essentials for Resilience. From applying the Disaster Resilience Scorecard, cities may develop a multi-year plan to improve resilience.
In the days following the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the World Bank disaster risk management (DRM) community worked to assess the damage, and support the Haitian government plan and enact what would become a massive and protracted recovery from this profound disaster. Accurate and up to date maps of the country were an important component of these planning efforts. These maps came from an unexpected source, a global community of volunteer mappers, who, using their internet connections and access to satellite imagery, were able to contribute to mapping Haiti from their own homes.Following the Haiti earthquake, the World Bank, Google, and several other entities made high-resolution imagery of the affected area available to the public. Over 600 individuals from the global OpenStreetMap (OSM) community began digitizing the imagery, tracing roads, building outlines, and other infrastructure, creating what quickly became the most detailed map of Port au Prince that had ever existed. Volunteers from 29 countries made about 1.2 million edits to the map, performing an estimated year of cartographic work in about 20 days. This effort catalyzed a rethinking of community mapping and open data within the World Bank and other international institutions.
"About 80 percent of the investment in a city typically comes from the private sector, so the private sector does have a stake in making cities more resilient. We spend a great deal of effort to respond to natural disasters, but we have not done very well as a society to plan response actions to mitigate the impacts of natural disasters," said Dale Sands, vice chair of the United Nations’ Private Sector Advisory Group for the International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction, as reported by Greenbiz. Sands was talking earlier this year at a Sustainable Business Fridays conversation held by the Bard MBA in Sustainability program, based in New York City.
This 2-pager highlights an alternative way of organising the post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction, along sector-based lines, and reiterates three strategies for pursuing effective disaster resilience for sustainable development. It is part of ODI's effort to offer support and guidance to governments contributing to the negotiations on the post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction, with the intention for a new agreement to be signed in Sendai, Japan in March 2015. It relies on the 1 and 2 page graphical representations issued by the Co-Chairs authoring the drafts of the new framework, which are powerful inputs to the process.
In the days following the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the World Bank disaster risk management (DRM) community worked to assess the damage, and support the Haitian government plan and enact what would become a massive and protracted recovery from this profound disaster. Accurate and up to date maps of the country were an important component of these planning efforts. These maps came from an unexpected source, a global community of volunteer mappers, who, using their internet connections and access to satellite imagery, were able to contribute to mapping Haiti from their own homes.Following the Haiti earthquake, the World Bank, Google, and several other entities made high-resolution imagery of the affected area available to the public. Over 600 individuals from the global OpenStreetMap (OSM) community began digitizing the imagery, tracing roads, building outlines, and other infrastructure, creating what quickly became the most detailed map of Port au Prince that had ever existed. Volunteers from 29 countries made about 1.2 million edits to the map, performing an estimated year of cartographic work in about 20 days. This effort catalyzed a rethinking of community mapping and open data within the World Bank and other international institutions.
Reporting for Devex on the promising progress this week’s 2nd World Reconstruction Conference in Washington, Rolf Rosenkranz argued that local ownership and governance, as well as coordination among public, private and civil society stakeholders, is crucial to the success of any disaster risk reduction or resiliency plan. Citing the remarks of El Salvador’s secretary for vulnerability issues, Jorge Melendez, he illustrated the efforts to incorporate risk reduction and prevention into the country’s development strategy. "Vulnerabilities need to be identified in order to be able to reduce the associated risk and undertake mitigation measures. Investing in the resilience of infrastructure and communities is more effective.
This brochure presents the third of five Programmes aimed to improve coherence, focus, depth and efficiency in delivering the results of UNISDR Strategic Framework: Towards 2025. This Programme will address one of the key underlying drivers of disaster risk: poor urban governance. By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas. As cities continue to grow, exposure of lives, livelihoods and economic, social and environmental assets is set to increase exponentially. The local level is the frontline of addressing disaster risk and is where significant gains can be made.