News and announcements

'Through this successful initiative, we were able to reduce the vulnerability of life and property, better manage land and environment and substantially improve contingency planning for disasters,' said Fenella Frost, Head of the Unit for Disaster Risk Reduction for the United Nations Development Programme for Development...

It is crucial for the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation in Cairo to be able to predict the amount of water flowing in the Nile in the next decades, reports AlertNet. A project led by the Danish Hydrological Institute, Met Office Hadley Centre and MWRI aims to research how climate change would affect water resources in the region...

'This is a tool that needs to develop into something more in tune with the reality of local communities,' said Vibhu Nayar, founder of the Centre of Excellence for Change in Chennai, India, which works on mitigating climate change-related water and food crises...

'The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change...' said Tom Wagner, NASA's cryosphere program manager in Washington. 'Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system.'...

Disaster risk reduction received just 4 percent of overall aid funds from 2006 to 2011 according to DI, rather than the 10 percent recommended by prevention experts. The aid sector is still trying to work out what DDR means in terms of programming, but authors of a new report, Gubbels and Poole said more funding is not the only answer...

Charlie Dalrymple of RedR said: 'Effective Disaster Risk Reduction is vitally important to future emergency response. The results of this survey show that there is much work to do to make sure DRR is incorporated into aid and development programmes and to ensure that humanitarian and development professionals are pulling in the same direction.'...

'Both the government and companies should establish a new philosophy of disaster prevention that requires safety and disaster measures against any massive accident and disaster regardless of event probability,' the a report requested by the Japanese government found...

'Images captured from ISERV on the ISS could provide valuable information back here on Earth,' said Dan Irwin, SERVIR program director at Marshall. 'We hope it will provide new data and information from space related to natural disasters, environmental crises and the increased effects of climate variability on human populations.'...