Press release

A Mongolian Government official was named 2005 laureate of the prestigious United Nations Sasakawa award for his groundbreaking work on dzud, or "white death," the combination of extreme winter conditions that have killed more than 8.5 million livestock

“The tragic series of natural hazards that has recently hit Japan reminds us that all countries, rich or poor, are subject to increasing threats from social vulnerability and natural hazards,” said Salvano Briceño, Director of ISDR, the UN secretariat in

Almost three weeks following the deadly tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people and affected several million in the Indian Ocean region, the ISDR secretariat notes 10 preliminary lessons learned from the disaster.

Leaders of Indonesia's Simeulue community received a prestigious U.N. award here for saving tens of thousands of lives during the Dec. 26 tsunami. Thanks to faith in their own knowledge of how the sea behaves and the reaction of buffaloes ahead of the

In the case of last night’s earthquake, tsunami alerts were given after 40 minutes of the quake by the Japan Meteorology Agency to 6 Indian Ocean countries including India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Tourists were evacuated from risk prone areas

Italy, with 20,000 people dead, has become the country that registered the most casualties related to the heat weave that affected Western Europe during the summer of 2003. With these new figures for Italy, the official number of casualties for the whole

This year’s International Day for Disaster Reduction falls on the third anniversary of the South Asian Earthquake. On this day three years ago, 73% of health facilities were destroyed in the affected area of Pakistan, making them unable to function when

“Flooding is already on the rise due to increasing population living in flood plains, and climate change will make floods more frequent and severe, with a particular impact on deltas. The recent floods in Bangladesh, Nepal and India are glimpses of a

When the Indian Ocean Tsunami hit in December 2004, over 250,000 people were killed throughout Asia, but only seven people died out of a population of approximately 83,000 on Simeulue Island, just 40km from the epicenter of the earthquake. Nearly the

94% of people killed by natural hazards between 1975-2000 were on low incomes or lower middle incomes; half of all disaster deaths for the last decade occur in low human development countries. Climate change is likely to exacerbate the current situation