Australia celebrates international day for disaster reduction 2011
October 13 is the International Day for Disaster Reduction, when Australia, like many other developed nations, focuses its attention on efforts to build resilience in developing countries vulnerable to the impacts of natural disasters.
In recent weeks new flooding in Pakistan, an earthquake in Nepal and a typhoon in the Philippines have demonstrated how vulnerable developing countries can be to natural hazards, and how quickly development progress can be wiped out by a natural disaster.
A 2010 World Bank and UN report, Natural Hazards, Unnatural Disasters: The economics of effective prevention, calculates that storms, floods, earthquakes and droughts caused more than 3.3 million deaths and US$2.3 trillion in damage between 1970 and 2010.
The recently developed UN World Risk Index ranked 173 countries in terms of their vulnerability to natural hazards. Among the 20 nations most at risk are a number of countries that receive Australian Government development assistance: Vanuatu (1), Tonga (2), Philippines (3), Solomon Islands (4), Bangladesh (6), East Timor (7), Cambodia (9), Papua New Guinea (12), Afghanistan (15) and Fiji (19).
AusAID is working with the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) to help governments build resilience to disasters. This includes:
- providing money for new weather and climate information systems
- strengthening early warning and emergency preparedness systems
- creating safety nets for vulnerable populations
- promoting sustainable land management
- protecting critical infrastructure
- strengthening national and local institutions; and
- build back better programs after tragedy strikes.
AusAID is also integrating disaster risk reduction measures into more than 30 of its country programs around the world.