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“The strong tropical cyclone in Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as the devastating floods in Romania, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Austria and Germany are yet another reminder that natural hazards are a global threat. We need to pay more attention to social vulnerability to hazards”, says Salvano Briceño, director of the Secretariat for the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR). “Anyone can be affected, any day, anywhere by disaster originated by a natural hazard. As a tourist or as a traveller, we can be faced by disasters that do not exist in our country. Therefore, we have to be constantly prepared and educated for all types of natural disasters.”

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The United Nations Deputy Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery Eric Schwartz will travel to Sri Lanka and Indonesia tomorrow on a 10-day fact-finding mission to see the impact of last December’s tsunami on people’s lives and to gauge the progress of the recovery.

Mr. Schwartz will hold talks with Government officials, representatives of UN agencies, civil society and the business community, while assessing the online financial contribution tracking system, as well as shelter, livelihoods and sustainable timber sourcing.

Meanwhile, in Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s report on the UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, he urges governments to maintain their support for the development of a tsunami early warning system.

 

Nearly seventy percent of people in the tsunami-hit Maldives believe that they could have done more to reduce the impact of last year’s tsunami, according to a United Nations survey.

The news comes as moves are made to establish a local version of the Indian Ocean early warning system and make the Maldives tsunami-ready.

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United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today urged seismic engineers meeting in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to use their expertise to help reduce the human consequences of earthquakes and to raise public awareness about ways national, global and regional responses to natural disasters can be improved.

“As earthquake engineers, you are instrumental in bringing scientific knowledge to bear on this global challenge,” said Mr. Annan in a statement delivered by Salvàno Briceño, Director of the Secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), in Skopje at the opening of the International Conference on Earthquake Engineering in the 21st Century.

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The United Nations environmental agency today announced a multi-million dollar project to help some of the world’s poorest people better cope with drought and pest infestations, targeting 20 pilot areas for restoration of damaged forests, soils, water and other key life-support systems in southern Niger and northern Nigeria.

The wide-ranging, $14.5 million project, being launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), aims to strengthen the way natural resources are managed, boost legal and institutional frameworks and streamline cooperation between the two countries, thus helping to alleviate poverty and increase food production, while improving the health and viability of fragile ecosystems.

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Bhutan recently hosted a workshop designed to build partnerships for earthquake risk management on 19 August 2005, which was co-organised under the ‘Thimphu Valley Earthquake Risk Management Project’ (TVERMP) by the Standards and Quality Control Authority of the Bhutanese Ministry of Work and Human Settlements and UNDP/BCPR.

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For more information : UNDP Bhutan

With Malawi facing its worst food crisis in more than a decade due to drought, floods, consecutive poor harvests, endemic poverty and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today appealed for urgent donor assistance to prevent the crisis from deteriorating further later this year.

“The impacts of the failed harvest won't be felt fully until the lean season sets in between October and April,” the FAO emergency coordinator in the Southern African country, Tesfai Ghermazien, said, noting that more than 4.2 million people, or over 34 per cent of the population, are already unable to meet their food needs.

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For more information : UNDP Malawi

Myanmar has been selected with its coastal region to be included in five areas in Southeast Asia (SEA) where the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) projects to build tsunami-warning centers, a local weekly reported in its latest issue.

Quoting the UNDP, the Myanmar Times said the warning centers would be operational by late December this year, the first anniversary of the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami that swept across coastal areas of the Indian Ocean killing over 200,000 people.

Monitoring towers will be built off Myanmar coast along with those of Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines with the assistance of the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, the report said.

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For more information : UNDP Myanmar

A major element of a United Nations-backed tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean should be up and running by the end of the year as part of an international effort to prevent a recurrence of last December's catastrophe, when experts believe tens of thousands of people could have been saved had they been alerted in time.

A three-day meeting of the system's Intergovernmental Coordination Group (ICG), its first, which ended in Perth, Australia, today, heard that 23 stations of a real-time sea-level observation network covering the whole Indian Ocean basin are expected to be established before 31 December. Six such stations are already operational.

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In the post-tsunami recovery phase, the Tamil Nadu Tsunami Resource Centre has been established in Chennai to facilitate a rehabilitation process that reduces peoples' vulnerability and increases their resilience to deal with future hazards. The centre is supported by the Government of Tamil Nadu, the UN System and several Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) including Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision, Caritas India and Catholic Relief Services.

The Centre will help address needs in the recovery phase systematically, for a coherent disaster response in the affected communities. By connecting to a network of district resource centres to collect and disseminate information and resources, the centre would add an additional impetus to making the recovery effort and the post-tsunami response for the people on the ground more efficient and transparent.

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More information : UNDP India / DRU Asia

As part of continuing efforts to help coastal communities recover from the devastating effects of last year's Indian Ocean tsunami, United Nations agencies today announced the distribution of fishing equipment in Sri Lanka and strategies for the reconstruction of ports in Indonesia. Close to 900 fishing nets, along with 67 boat engines, were distributed to fishermen in Galle, Sri Lanka on Saturday, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Agency (FAO), as part of a project funded by the Government of Japan.

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A South Asian conference on gender concerns in post-tsunami reconstruction was held in Sri Lanka in July, organized by the Suriya Women's Development Centre and funded by UNDP, and attended by more than one hundred women from Banda Aceh, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh. The conference focused on common issues that women were facing, and worked to plan common strategies and share resources on better participation of women in reconstruction efforts.

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UNDP Maldives is taking a “Recovery Plus” approach that goes beyond simply rebuilding that focuses on the long-term. Find some of the briefs of UNDP’s work, including restoring livelihoods, preparing for future risks, rebuilding communities, and repairing homes.

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