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The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 led to the closure of European airspace and harmed air quality. Until monitoring stations were established last year, Scotland was ill-equipped to assess how it was affected. Now, its environmental agency is consulting on a new monitoring network to detect the release of particulates and sulphur dioxide from Iceland’s volcanoes.
As the Earth’s temperature rises at an alarming rate, Britain faces the threat of catastrophic flooding. An upcoming Climate Change Committee assessment report will outline the most urgent risks from climate change. Initial estimates put the cost of flooding at £428m as the average global temperature rises by 2C and 180,000 more British homes at risk of flooding by 2050.
Under an accord announced Tuesday, Pacific Gas & Electric Co (PG&E) will close California's last plant, ending safety debates over proximity to seismic faults. PG&E has long said the plant is safe from the largest potential earthquake in the region, but new research has led to questions about nearby faults, their shaking potential and how the company evaluates them.
Forest wildfires rampaging across Russia are being significantly under-reported by authorities, according to Greenpeace. Analysis of satellite data reveals 3.5m hectares have burned this year, while government statistics claim only 669,000 hectares. Understating the extent of wildfires delays assistance from other regions and can even lead to human casualties.
A new tool developed by engineering consultancy Arup for the Rockefeller Foundation, the City Resilience Index, measures a city's resilience through a quantitative and qualitative survey recording issues of health, economy, infrastructure and ecosystems.
Fires in temperate forests are generally increasing in size and area. This is partly because of climate change. But by dousing small, regular fires, forest managers are also creating the conditions for cataclysmic events, according to scientists.
The school or hospital that ends up being most costly is the one that fails in a natural disaster. To manage disaster, we need to manage risk, write Robert Glasser, head of disaster risk reduction for the UN and Stephen O’Brien, UN Under-Secretary-General for OCHA.
The world’s failure to prepare for natural disasters will have “inconceivably bad” consequences as climate change fuels a huge increase in catastrophic droughts and floods and the humanitarian crises that follow, the UN’s head of disaster planning has warned.
Voluntary Commitments
The organization has no registered commitments.
The Sendai Framework Voluntary Commitments (SFVC) online platform allows stakeholders to inform the public about their work on DRR. The SFVC online platform is a useful toolto know who is doing what and where for the implementation of the Sendai Framework, which could foster potential collaboration among stakeholders. All stakeholders (private sector, civil society organizations, academia, media, local governments, etc.) working on DRR can submit their commitments and report on their progress and deliverables.