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Intensive rains caused the Strumica River in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to flood thousands of hectares of farmland in February 2015. Efforts to clear the river of waste includes an EUR 800,000 project that has cleared 23 kilometres of regulated canals and repaired damaged embankments, significantly reducing the blockage and the risk of overflow.

The European Commission and the United Nations Development Programme have launched an initiative to increase disaster prevention in cities across seven countries and territories in the Western Balkans. The initiative will create networks of local responders, allowing disaster-prone municipalities to intervene, support each other and unlock funds in case of disaster.

Five Balkan countries are boosting their skills to improve hospital safety and reduce human and economic losses during disasters and health emergencies. Balkan countries are challenged by frequent natural disasters so capacity building and training is imperative: from knowledge sharing to ensuring health care services are safe, effective and available to those in need.

Rolled out in the wake of one of the deadliest storms to strike Europe in decades, the continent-wide weather information service Meteoalarm plays a life-saving role by raising public awareness of how to curb risks, and fosters international cooperation into the bargain.

A team of experts in disaster recovery from the EU, UN and World Bank will work with former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia national counterparts to identify the causes and impacts of the recent floods. This includes ensuring that damaged infrastructure is ‘built back better’ and that reconstruction projects are also designed as investments in preventing future disasters.

Uncertainty about future climate creates challenges in both adaptation planning and evaluation. Defining and determining success in adaptation therefore can be difficult. This publication, however, does not attempt to address all of the issues and

In the past two years alone, the magnitude of disasters increased significantly in the Western Balkans, affecting 15 times more people and causing economic losses 30 times higher than in the period from 2000 to 2013. While recovery actions financed

The Programme has been designed to help the country overcome the damage caused by flooding in 2015 and to reconstruct and upgrade the country’s flood prevention infrastructure over the next two and a half years. The project is funded by the European Union and will be implemented by UNDP.