Corporate Disaster Resource Network, CDRN

Sunday, June 23, 2013

CDRN APPEAL – For the Affected in Uttarakhand and Himachal Flood

APPEAL – For the Affected in Uttarakhand and Himachal

Flood

Uttarakhand, Himachal and adjoining areas have been hit by torrential rain, landslides and flash floods. The erratic weather conditions have been attributed to early monsoons in Northern India due to which early warnings were not provided and people have been affected adversely. River Ganges and its major tributaries of Alaknanda and Bhagirathi have swelled up, causing widespread destruction downstream. Kinnaur district in Himachal Pradesh, has received the highest rainfall in 20 years over the last three days.

Corporate Disaster Resource Network (CDRN), implemented by Aidmatrix Foundation, created under the Corporate Task Force of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) is organizing a dispatch of Relief Material with a base at Joshimath where relief agencies are assessing, coordinating and implementing relief efforts. Dispatches are being coordinated in two processes i.e., collections and dispatch to the nearest accessible regions and then locally thereof through field officers to reach the last mile where vehicles are not reaching.

This does mean that individuals will be covering large distances on foot to deliver support. Due to the present weather conditions the accessibility will be un- predictable but we are working towards a hub and spoke intervention for timely deliveries to help those that need it the most.

We are working towards a comprehensive coordinated response for near term and long term appeal to join hands and provide relief to the affected immediately and later for rehabilitation needs that will be there.

Immediate Needs:

Family Kits costing INR 1800 consisting of :

Food for Four Family Members for a Week

Toothpaste

Soap

Washing Powder

Sanitary Napkins

Childrens Books and Colours

Blankets 4

Disposable Spoons and pots

Mosquito Net

Water Purification Tablets

First Aid Kit

Other Needs:

·      Ready to Eat Food
·      Non Perishable Food i.e., Wheat Flour, Rice, Oil, Pulses, Sugar
·      Tents (Shelter)
·      Drinking Water
·      Medicines
·      Solar Lights / Lanterns
·      Clothes
·      Blankets
·      Water Purification Tablets etc.
You may call us for a pick up for the support or drop at the collection warehouse of Delhi FoodBank near Cyber City:

Plot No 2118
Near Rapid Metro Station
DLF Phase III.
Gurgaon - 122002. India
(10m – 6pm: Monday – Saturday)
For further information on in-kind product or financial contribution please contact: Jatin: 9811342299 / Shikha: 9958329648 / Rishi: 9654703871 / Kuldip: 9810007524 or email at communications@cdrn.org.in

Number of District Affected	5
Districts Affected	Uttarkashi ,Rudraprayag, Chamoli, Tehri and Pithoragarh
Number of People Affected	75,000
Number of buildings damaged	350 Collapsed

Flood Situation Highlights:

· Road network and mobile (Communication) networks have been damaged.

· 350 buildings collapsed across the state. (Source : State Control Room)

· 54 persons dead and 65 injured seriously. (Source : State Control Room)

· 1000 animal loss (Source : State Control Room)

· 75000 pilgrims are stranded in all four Dhams (Source : State Control Room)

· District administration of all the affected Districts have released alerts and evacuated population living in the banks of river.

· Govt. has announced the helpline numbers – Uttarkashi -01374226126, 226461, Tehri – 01376-233433, Chamoli – 01372-251437, Rudraprayag – 01364-233727. 1077 is toll free number (Source : State Control Room)

About Corporate Disaster Resource Network (CDRN)

Corporate Disaster Resource Network (CDRN), implemented by Aidmatrix Foundation, created under the Corporate Task Force of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), India is a web based Humanitarian Relief management system that helps relief agencies, Response agencies, Suppliers, Donors and Governments to access and feed in real time information on products and services required and offered for emergency humanitarian relief to provide "The Right Aid, To the Right People, At The Right Time". Since its inception, CDRN has responded to 13 disasters.

With 5981 suppliers and 1545 relief agencies providing real time information on relief materials and needs from communities, CDRN serves as a national link among the Corporates, Public, Government and Voluntary sectors for product, service and volunteer contributions and supplies for emergencies and disasters. Visit us at www.cdrn.org.in

For further information contact: Jatin 9811342299 / Shikha: 9958329648 / Rishi: 9654703871 / Kuldip: 9810007524or email at communications@cdrn.org.in

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Catalysts of change in the face of high-altitude climate calamities

Situated in the mountainous region of Ladakh in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, Leh is one of the remotest administrative districts of India. Despite the cold desert climate, the Ladhakis have prospered; practicing agriculture at altitudes of over 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) in the brief summer months and under severe resource constraints. The harshness of the terrain has led Ladakhis to establish a way of life that is based on extremely efficient resource management, recycling, solid waste management and other ecological tenets of Buddhism.

In recent years, however, Leh has rapidly changed. The growing numbers of tourists has led many Ladakhis to abandon agriculture and move to the city for tourism-related businesses. The rapid urbanisation is also leading to overcrowding with an influx of migrant workers. Day-to-day life has been impacted as young Ladhakis increasingly adopt new and mainstream ideas of development. Local elders are concerned that these changes are resulting in the breakdown of their traditional value system and an abandonment of the longstanding ecological approach and indigenous wisdom.

The negative impact of these changes has become more apparent in recent times. Two severe flash floods, a phenomenon uncommon for the region, devastated Leh in 2006 and 2010. The damage was exacerbated by the overcrowding and encroachment on water channels. At the same time, Ladakhis have been witnessing a fast depletion of glaciers and snow cover; erratic water supply in the glacier fed streams; warmer temperatures; and new pest species that often destroy annual yields. These new realities have left Ladhakis increasingly insecure and uncertain about their future. Changes are happening at multiple levels and at a rate faster than can be managed and understood.

SEEDS, an NGO specialising in disaster risk reduction and recovery, started work in Leh in 2010 to support some of the worst affected families of the flash floods. The mission was to help reconstruct damaged houses. Two years later, SEEDS has helped rebuild 35 houses, constructed two community centres and conducted various mason trainings and school safety awareness activities. This work was supported by Cordaid, Care Today, Toshiba Japan, Kewal Remani Foundation and other donors.

Over this period, SEEDS’ learning on both the Ladakhi architectural ethos and their vulnerabilities has grown manifold. One could not help but notice how an extremely resilient community has started to become vulnerable and helpless in the face of climate changes. As strong advocates of ecologically sustainable and resilient development, seeds believes that integrating disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) into local development planning is an imperative step.

Therefore, with the support of CDKN and START, SEEDS has embarked on a 17-month action research project. The objective is to understand the factors and find the catalysts to bring about this integration in Leh. It looks at the relationship between local multi-stakeholder forums and policy environments. What is their potential to catalyse shifts in DRR and CCA policy in post-disaster contexts? What institutional mechanisms and governance structures can ensure the sustainability of such programmes?

Over the next year, SEEDS will be working with the local administration, which includes the Leh Autonomous Hill Council Development Authority and Leh district administration, NGOs, research organisations and community based oganisations in Leh. The activities will include coalition building, agenda setting and piloting of village level integrated CCA and DRR programmes.

As a first step, a one-day workshop was organised in Serthi valley, near Leh city, on July 27th, 2012. Over 100 men and women from villages in and Serthi attended to discuss issues of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. The venue itself told its own story. This community centre was built by SEEDS with the help of local families of Serthi. A creation of stone, mud and wood, it uses traditional Ladhaki architectural wisdom. The building construction and design is not only locally appropriate and sustainable, but also capable of enduring harsh weather conditions and holding out during earthquakes.

Serthi’s Area Councillor who was also present at the meeting, appreciated these efforts of SEEDS and the people of Serthi. He offered the support of the Hill Council for the development of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation programmes in Serthi and other parts of Leh; and pledged funds for the enhancement of the community center in Serthi. The Gobas (village heads), Sarpanchs (elected village chief administrator) and village elders all stressed the need for local solutions to the water issues that plague Leh. They also acknowledged the need for better preparedness and risk reduction from flash floods and the ever-present risk of earthquakes.

Read in detail at : http://cdrn.org.in/show.detail.asp?id=25242

Women 'are the foot soldiers of climate change adaptation' - expert

Thu, 2 Aug 2012 13:18 GMT

Source: Alertnet // Amantha Perera

A woman carries firewood gathered in a forest in the village of Rukam in the Batticaloa District of Eastern Sri Lanka. ALERTNET/Amantha Perera

By Amantha Perera

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AlertNet) – In 2006, when the Asian Development Bank (ADB) decided to launch a multi-million dollar rural water project in eastern and north central regions of Sri Lanka, there was one overriding requirement – women would be placed in key positions.

As a result, experts say, the $263 million program, aimed at providing drinking water to over 900,000 people by 2011, has been a particular success.

In the village of Talpothta, in the rural north-central Polonnaruwa District, the village women’s association is now central to the proper functioning of the new water supply plant provided under the ADB programme. Its members visit the over 200 users, read meters and more importantly advise beneficiaries on water usage when drought sets in.

“We know how much is needed. Women do most of the household work like cooking (and) washing clothes. We ask our members to limit use when we have problems,” said Sheila Herath, an association member.

Kusum Athukorala, one of the country’s leading experts on water management, agrees that women are key to adapting effective measures to deal with water challenges and changing climate patterns.

“Women are the foot soldiers of climate change adaptation,” said Athukorala who heads the Network of Women Water Professionals, Sri Lanka (NetWwater) and the Women for Water Partnership.

NetWwater’s efforts to create awareness among rural women on climate change, adaptation and water management have won support from Brandix, one of the island’s largest garment. That allows Athukorala to now travel the country, educating women on water management.

“One sixth of our water supply is from rural programmes managed by community-based organizations. If we don’t recognize the impact of over half of the population, these programmes will never succeed,” she said.

INDONESIA, CHINA AND FORESTS

In other Asian countries women also are playing crucial roles at the grassroots level in preserving the environment and making sure human-inflicted damage remains controllable. Avi Mahaningtyas, an Indonesian expert on forest management and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) told AlertNet that it was rural women who knew intimately the forest’s value to their lives.

“They know it by heart and by birth,” said Mahaningtyas, who heads the Environmental and Economic Governance Cluster of the Kemitraan-Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia, a national body that works on good governance.

The same sentiment is true in rural China, says Xiaobei Wang, a China gender specialist with Landesa Rural Development Institute, an international organisation that works on poverty and land rights. Wang told AlertNet that as men increasingly migrated to cities looking for jobs, it was women, left behind in the villages, who took care of the land and the forests.

"In China most of men from areas near forests have left as migrant workers, making women the major labour force. About 60 percent of those working in forests and farm land are women. If their rights are not protected and enforced, there will be lots of issues in reducing poverty in forest areas and ensuring the sustainable management of forests,” she said.

Indonesia’s Mahaningtyas said that if a forest is to be preserved, like any other natural resource, it needs to carry a value. “A forest with a value will not easily be cut down. And it is the people who work within it who will know intimately that value.”

However, despite their importance, women are still being largely left out of the decision making, according to a new report by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI). The report - The Challenges of Securing Women’s Tenure and Leadership for Forest Management: The Asian Experience - found that gender discrimination is still rampant.

Read in detail at :- http://cdrn.org.in/show.detail.asp?id=25243

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Population growth, climate change drive need for urban rethink

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 12:13 GMT

Source: Alertnet // Amantha Perera

A man sits with his two dogs after removing them from his flooded home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on November 11, 2010. Thousands of families were displaced after the heaviest rains in the Sri Lankan capital since 1992. REUTERS/Andrew Caballero-Reynolds

By Amantha Perera

RIO DE JANEIRO (AlertNet) – Just how fast is sustainable urban development becoming a focus? Look at its profile in the just-concluded Rio+20 UN conference on sustainable development in Rio.

Experts, UN officials and activists spoke of how the world’s bulging urban population will need a bigger share of resources and attention. If the bulk of the world’s urban population remains poor and locked out of the development processes, stresses will multiply, they said.

And changing climate patterns, they added, are likely to exacerbate the problems cities and their residents face. Asia, in particularly, will have to take action quickly as it is poised to see the largest urban growth in coming decades.

“It is tectonic shift in city development patterns that we are talking about here, and it will take time,” George McCarthy, director of the U.S.-based Ford Foundation’s urban opportunities programme told AlertNet.

“City planners will have to look more at investing in housing, transport, schools and other such infrastructure,” he said, in order to help the growing legions of urban poor.

Asia is where most of the changes are coming. Of the 1 billion people who will be added to the world's urban population in the next two decades, half will be in India and China, said Cornie Huizenga, convener of the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport (SloCat), a Shanghai-based organization that lobbies for sustainable urban transportation systems.

The world’s cities are already home to a billion in poverty, and failing to make needed changes will drive those numbers up, Huizenga warned.

“Cities will have to wake up to these issues, sooner (rather) than later,” he said.

For now, problems remain. Many cities, for instance, have had a decades-long focus on improving the efficiency of individual motor vehicles while failing to invest as much in improving public transport systems, Huizenga said. But SloCat research suggests that the combined costs of congestion, air pollution, road accidents and transport-related climate change are the equivalent of 5 to 10 percent of GDP for some Asian cities.

“If a city is developing at 12 percent (GDP) and this alone is taking out 10 percent, this is something that needs urgent fixing,” Huizenga said. At Rio, SloCat and other organizations lobbied to promote greater focus on and investment in public transport systems in cities – with some success.

$175 BILLION IN FUNDING

During the first day of the conference, six development banks including the dominant World Bank and Asian Development Bank said that they would create a $175 billion fund to help countries improve urban public transport.

The costs involved in creating the kind of development shifts advocated by McCarthy and Huizenga will not be small, especially for Asian cities.

Recently the World Bank said that it was providing $233 million in assistance to the Metro Development Project, which aims to improve the water retention and drainage system in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital.

In Colombo, over 47 percent of people live in what are classified as informal settlements, according to Sri Lanka’s Urban Development Authority (UDA). Such settlements and illegal landfills, which in some cases impede on waterways and drainage areas, have reduced the city’s drainage capacity by at least 30 percent in the last decade, the World Bank said.

In an effort to move informal settlers out of the path of waterways, the UDA is currently building 10,000 high-rise apartments, and another 15,000 are planned. Of the $233 million earmarked for the new Colombo drainage management scheme, over $50 million is expected to toward new housing, compensation payments and other expenses for around 1,500 families likely to lose their homes.

Improving public transportation also can carry big costs. In Asia, building a kilometer of subway system costs around $100 million and a kilometer of bus rapid transit system about $10 million, Huizenga said. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank are both expected to boost lending for such projects, he said.

But as urbanisation races ahead and climate change brings worsening pressures, many cities are realising the importance of making the needed investments, said Micheal Replogle, policy director at the Washington-basedInstitute for Transportation and Development Policy.

Colombo, for example, has seen parts of the city go underwater at least six times in the last 18 months as climate change appears to be altering the monsoon and bringing briefer but more intense rains. That has been one driver for the new spending on improving drainage, he said.

“I think cities are slowly realising the importance of investing in areas like public transport,” Replogle said.

The Ford Foundation’s McCarthy said one advantage for Asian cities trying to improve their urban infrastructure is that “they stand to gain from new technology and how things worked or otherwise in other parts of the world.”

Amantha Perera is a freelance writer based in Sri Lanka.

Link to the source:- http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/population-growth-climate-change-drive-need-for-urban-rethink/

West India drought fuels migration to cities

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:31 GMT

Source: Alertnet // Darryl D'Monte

Women agricultural labourers stand in a turmeric field at the end of a work day outside Sangli, about 380km (236 miles) south of Mumbai, Dec, 5, 2011. REUTERS/Vivek Prakash

By Darryl D'Monte

MUMBAI (AlertNet) - Worsening drought in western India is making it harder for men to find brides and pushing poor rural families to seek work in cities, as government policies to help them deal with crop failure and financial pressures fall short.

More than a dozen young men in a village in Khatav sub-district in Satara, in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, have been waiting in vain for brides for more than two years, since the dry spell began, the Daily New and Analysis(DNA) newspaper reported in May.

“No families in and around our village are ready to give their daughters to our boys,” farmer’s wife Sakubai Yadav, 45, told the DNA. Two other 26-year-old men have been biding their time for four years and have started drinking out of frustration, the paper said.

As well as doing household chores, young brides are expected to fetch water from wells up to 3 km away in the searing heat – a burden some don’t want to take on. And in order to get by after poor harvests, some wives have had to join the federal government’s rural employment guarantee scheme, which provides villagers with up to 100 days’ work a year.

Other families have left their villages, along with their cattle, to look for work in cities including Mumbai, the state capital, less than 300 km away. Once there, many become slum dwellers.

Some 6,000 people out of Maan sub-district’s population of 200,000 have permanently migrated to urban areas in the past year, according to Yogendra Katiyare, the top local government official. Last year’s census shows that the inhabitants of Aundh village, for example, dropped to 7,500 from 9,000 a decade ago.

Climate factors appear to be playing a growing part in this migration. The increasingly erratic nature of rainfall in the Khatav and Maan areas of Satara can be linked to climate change, according to Ramachandra Sable, former head of the meteorology department at Rahuri Agricultural University in eastern Maharashtra.

Sable told AlertNet that monsoon patterns are changing, leading to depletion of groundwater levels. Valsa Nair Singh, Maharashtra’s environment secretary, confirmed that the water level in Satara’s aquifers has dropped.

Khatav and Maan are located in the shadow of the Mahabaleshwar hills, which receive annual rainfall of around 6,000 mm - but the water does not flow eastwards. Analysing the last three decades of rain in these areas, Sable found that 60 percent of years were deficient, 20 percent normal and only 20 percent above average.

Rakesh Kumar of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in Mumbai, who is reviewing data for the next assessment report of the U.N. climate panel, told AlertNet that the severity and frequency of drought in the area is increasing due to climate change. A rise in the summer temperature is reducing moisture retention in the soil, he observed.

IRRIGATION MISMANAGED

The impacts of climate shifts have been compounded by political corruption and bureaucratic indifference, according to Delhi-based Sunita Narain, the editor ofDown to Earth magazine. She says funds earmarked for drought relief have not been used efficiently and irrigation schemes are being mismanaged.

“Reports by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India speak about scandalous ways in which dams are built but canals are not, and about cost escalations so high that projects become unviable and are never completed,” Narain wrote in a May 31 editorial.

The opposition Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) in Maharashtra says the state has spent close to Rs. 66,000 crores ($12 billion) on irrigation schemes in the last 10 years. Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan admitted last month that, despite this expenditure, only a 0.1 percent increase in land under irrigation was achieved in the decade, according to Infrawindow.com, a construction news website.

Yet 40 percent of the state’s irrigation capacity – the potential of projects to deliver water - lies unused, according to Maharashtra’s annual economic survey.

Maharashtra is the only state in India that provides water to industry in preference to agriculture, Narain asserts, with the economic survey noting that only half of storage capacity is used for farming.

And Maharashtra grows two-thirds of India’s sugar cane - a crop that guzzles water in a region where some women spend three hours a day fetching pails of water for family needs.

Sugar is big politics in the region, with leaders heading co-operatives that get bank loans at reduced rates, as well as other favours. The Economic Timesreported last month that the state BJP leader, Gopinath Munde, is now the region’s main sugar baron, with his company believed to own some 25 mills.

THIRSTY CITIES

Home to the huge cities of Mumbai and Pune, Maharashtra is more urbanised than most other Indian states, and the demand of big residential areas for water is huge and growing.

The Mumbai Municipal Corporation has just announced the completion of a new dam in the hinterland, which will deliver 455 million litres of water per day to 12.5 million inhabitants. Some of the water was previously being used by farmers and other rural dwellers.

The current state of affairs seems ironic, given that Maharashtra was the first Indian state to initiate drought relief back in 1972.

It started an employment guarantee scheme providing cash and food to people in affected areas. The initiative won international accolades, including from the World Bank, but later languished due to official apathy, according to Mick Moore and Vishal Jadhav, writing in the Journal of Development Studies in 2006.

In the early days, work was carried out on big irrigation projects with politicians’ backing. But when the focus shifted to smaller schemes, politicians lost interest, the researchers said.

A prize-winning investigative journalist, P. Sainath, published a best-seller in the early 1990s, entitled Everybody Loves a Good Drought, based on his visits to India’s 10 poorest districts. The title chapter explored how bureaucrats and politicians used disaster situations to clamour for more funds from the federal government, only to siphon off some of the money for themselves - a situation that Sainath maintains continues today.

SUICIDES

Some villagers are also bitter that local wind farm operators are reaping profits while they are struggling to cope with drought. Satara district has 1,100 wind turbines, accounting for 1,600 megawatts (MW) of power capacity.

Activist Bharat Patankar has led a movement since 2003 which has forced the government to pay land owners a fee of Rs 15,000 ($81) per year for every MW of capacity installed on their land.

But rural folk say government initiatives intended to help them get through drought periods are simply not enough. Young men from Khatav and Maan are finding the guaranteed employment daily wage of Rs 131 ($2.40) too little, and are heading to the cities.

People in eastern Maharashtra are also suffering, as the region suffers from near-perennial drought. The cotton fields of Vidarbha, for example, have witnessed a spate of farmer suicides due to the pressure of large loans they can’t repay.

The Hindu newspaper reported last October that farm suicides in Maharashtra had topped 50,000 between 1995 and 2010, with the yearly average increasing this century, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Darryl D’Monte, former editor of the Times of India in Mumbai, heads the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India and is the founding president of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists. He is based in Mumbai.

Link to the source:- http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/west-india-drought-fuels-migration-to-cities/

Severe Weather Warnings DATE : JUNE 28, 2012

HEAVY RAINFALL WARNING

HEAVY TO VERY HEAVY RAINFALL WOULD OCCUR AT A FEW PLACES OVER ASSAM & MEGHALAYA, ARUNACHAL PRADESH AND SUB-HIMALAYAN WEST BENGAL & SIKKIM DURING NEXT 48 HOURS. HEAVY RAINFALL WOULD OCCUR AT ONE OR TWO PLACES OVER NAGALAND, MANIPUR, MIZORAM & TRIPURA AND COASTAL KARNATAKA AND KONKAN & GOA DURING NEXT 48 HOURS.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Indonesia to host major conference on disasters in Asia

Photo credit

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (Photo:CIFOR)

BANGKOK, 26 June, 2012 - The Indonesian government today announced details of the Fifth Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction which it will host in October as the region counts the cost of record-breaking disaster losses over the last year. Indonesia made disaster risk reduction a national priority following the 2004 Asian tsunami.

Last year, 137 out of the 302 major disasters reported worldwide occurred in Asia causing the majority of disaster deaths and more than US$ 274 billion in economic losses which represented more than 75.1 per cent of the global figure of US$365 billion.

“As a country which has experienced so many natural hazards, Indonesia is proud to host this important event and to share with other countries its experience in disaster risk reduction because we know that prevention pays,” said President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of Indonesia, who was officially appointed Global Champion for Disaster Risk Reduction by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon last November.

Margareta Wahlström, Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNISDR, who has travelled extensively in the region over the last 12 months to see at first-hand the impact of disasters at community level, said: “The Conference will take stock of achievements in reducing the impact of disasters and demonstrate through strong active participation of local governments and civil society organizations, the importance of their action to strengthen resilience, and it will discuss opportunities for partnerships for action.

“I also consider this an important opportunity to debate and plan for a successor agreement to the international framework for disaster risk reduction, the Hyogo Framework for Action which will expire in 2015. Asia will have a significant influence on what kind of post-2015 framework we put in place to protect economies and development gains.”

More than 1,000 participants, including government Ministers and high-level representatives from 60 countries will gather in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, at the Fifth Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, October 22-25, to discuss how local policies and practices can make their communities safer against disasters.

To know more about the conference and the programme please see the following site: http://5thamcdrr-indonesia.net/

Press release [PDF 35.82 kB]

Source:- http://www.unisdr.org/archive/27392