News and announcements

The Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Catherine Bragg, highlighted the need to build national and local capacity, invest in disaster risk reduction, and improve humanitarian coordination and collaboration in order to promote resilience and sustainable livelihoods in the Horn...

'The nuclear industry is responding to the lessons learned from Fukushima with actions that provide the greatest safety benefit in the quickest amount of time,' said Tony Pietrangelo, the Nuclear Energy Institute's senior vice president and chief nuclear officer...

UNISDR Chief, Margareta Wahlström, today visited parts of Vietnam's Mekong Delta which were affected by storm surges last October and are most vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by climate change.

These impacts in the nature of extreme events and disasters not only have humanitarian significance but economic consequences as well, asserts R K Pachauri reports for the Economic Times...

Nearly seven years after Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans exposed the vulnerability of nursing homes, serious shortcomings persist. 'We identified many of the same gaps in nursing home preparedness and response,' investigators from the inspector general's office of the Health and Human Services Department wrote in the report being released Monday...

'The objective of the project is to develop human and technical capacity of public institutions to understand and address immediate [Glacial Lake Outburst Flood] risks for vulnerable communities in Northern Pakistan' and to enable local communities to adapt to climate change pressures by responding to GLOF risks...

'People become used to those warnings. That is a dangerous complacency,' said Sedgwick County Emergency Management Director Randy Duncan.' 'We need to break through the clutter of everyday noise to get people's attention'...

During his visit to the mayor of the earthquake-hit Christchurch in southern New Zealand, the chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference called on the two countries to strengthen exchanges and cooperation in disaster prevention and reconstruction...