Disaster preparedness manual launched at G20

At the Group of 20 meeting the government of Mexico, the World Bank with the contribution from 15 other countries and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have published Disaster Risk Assessment and Risk Financing, a manual for the best practices to deal with natural disasters, reports Xinhua.

The document recommends governments to concentrate on financial stability, to ensure that risks are allocated to the private sector, to establish transparent rules about distributing disaster funds and to consider ahead of time the financial implications of investing in disaster risk reduction projects.

"For less developed countries, natural disaster costs represent one third of all development aid. The number of such once-in-a-lifetime events has increased dramatically in the last decade," said World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.