Guardian, the (UK)

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.

As climate change risks go, rising sea levels fail to sound the same alarm bells as dramatic weather events and melting ice caps. A new breed of insurers, risk analysts and designers is aiming to help businesses and homeowners prepare for their long-term effect : flooded cities, submerged coastal areas, mass migrations.

In December 2015, the city of Chennai, India, was struck by devastating floods. In the aftermath of the disaster, local authorities sought advice from other cities whose experience of flooding – and pioneering plans to alleviate flood risk – could ensure Chennai is less badly affected the next time the rains hit with such force.

By tackling the environment we can also mitigate the impact of disasters, write Helen Clark, head of UN Development Programme and Robert Glasser, head of UNISDR in an opinion piece published in the Guardian.

In June 2009, not long after Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires claimed 173 lives and destroyed more than 2000 houses, a group of architects came together to help those who had been affected, reports the Guardian. As part of the 'We will Rebuild' initiative, they offered free consultations and 19 customisable pro bono designs, which were environmentally sustainable and met the “higher end” of the building standards for those in bushfire prone areas...

Monsoon floods hit the Indonesian capital in 2015, sparking 100,000 Twitter conversations. The Guardian reports how those tweets were used in the rescue operation. PetaJakarta.org (Map Jakarta) was born, its is an online platform that transforms Twitter into an emergency data gathering and critical alert service during flooding in Jakarta...

The UK international development secretary Justine Greening admits that the government has no specific scheme to introduce a national action plan or taskforce to implement the goals. Instead the government will continue to focus on party manifesto commitments, in the belief that in some way this will contribute to achieving the SDGs, reports the Guardian...