Philippines: St. Bernard shares best practices at international forum

Southern Leyte - Approximately 100 delegates including the International Recovery Platform (IRP) community of practitioners, experts, professionals, national and local government officials, and the academe attended the International Recovery Forum held in Kobe, Japan, January 20-23.

Here, St. Bernard Mayor Rico Rentuza, of Southern Leyte was one of the panelists and speaker.

The annual event serves as a venue to explore specific measures to address gaps in the recovery practices and identify resources to the said problem, St. Bernard Municipal Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council Public Information Officer Rosalinda Jane Araneta in a press statement said.

Araneta disclosed that, “Mayor Rentuza presented the inputs which focused on the major role of government especially as policy-maker in risk reduction and recovery.” During the session, significant policies and tools were dealt with effectively as there is a continuing intensification of patterns of risk in both urban and rural environment, she said.

The local governments are the closest institutional level to the citizens and to their communities, which play the first role in responding to crises and in attending to the needs of their constituents, more importantly on the planning and implementing the disaster risk reduction management and recovery projects down to the grassroots, the source added.

Araneta said that along St. Bernard’s inputs on its experience from the tragedy, the Japan forum also drew on recent experiences of the local governments, including the Great East Japan Earthquake.

The said forum also aimed to guide other local governments on integrating DRR into pre-and- post-disaster recovery planning as well as the rural and urban planning.

Araneta reported that the output-document will be shared globally through IRP partners on DRR in Geneva on May 2013 for the 2015 Global Framework.

The Japan forum was jointly organized and sponsored by the International Recovery Platform, the Cabinet Office of Japan, Asian Disaster Reduction Center, United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and JICA, among others, Araneta said. (PIA 8, Southern Leyte)