Regional Training on Disaster Inventories: Towards developing capacities for risk reduction in the Arab region

UNISDR's Regional Office for Arab States, supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Regional Centre for Disaster Risk Reduction (RCDRR) in Cairo, are joining efforts to provide focused support towards the development of national disaster databases in the Arab region.

The development of national disaster databases represents a low cost, high impact strategy for visualising risk patterns and trends and their relationship to development indices such as poverty. As such, it can act as a crucial first step towards developing institutional and national capacities for risk information management systems.

The present collaboration in the Arab region will provide focused support to develop national institutional capacities in managing risk information systems to inform decision-making processes with respect to risk reduction and climate change adaptation measures within a sustainable development framework.

In this context a regional training on disaster inventories will be hosted by the Regional Centre for Disaster Risk Reduction in Cairo from 8 to 11 March 2010. A tentative agenda is available. Training guidelines/ manuals for the disaster inventory management system will soon be made available in Arabic and English on preventionweb.net