Reducing local government vulnerabilities and building local resilience to natural hazards

According to the UNESCAP in 2011, Asia is the world’s most vulnerable to natural disasters, with its people four times more likely to be affected by nature’s wrath than those in Africa, and 25 times more likely than those in Europe or North America.

To ensure effective and sustainable progress on development and growth targets, local or urban centres must integrate disaster risk management into planning approaches.

The aim of this three-day workshop is to contribute to this objective and preventive outlook on risk mitigation and integration local planning approaches for the Asia-Pacific region.

Building resilience towards natural hazards, the topic of this workshop, is only one of the wide-ranging issues of human safety and security, but it is a topic that needs to be tackled with in an urgent manner in view of the emerging issues related to climate change. It is notable in this sense that UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) launched the 2010-2011 World Disaster Reduction Campaign, “Making Cities Resilient”.

Cities in the Asia-Pacific region can substantially improve the situation by focusing and sharing experiences on risk identification to reduce vulnerability, regional cooperation towards building resilience, national to local governance coordination, promoting public awareness, and locally contextualising manuals for disaster relief and improved local development planning.

Learning objectives:

1. To increase awareness on human security and environmental security in the region.
2. To identify key challenges in disaster mitigation and to recognize good practices to reduce vulnerability and build resilience to natural hazards at the local level.
3. To develop action plans for local implementation and follow-up of lessons learned (via city-to-city cooperation, awareness raising activities, inter-governmental coordination, and other practical measures for implementation).