An introduction to towards a safer world - practical approaches to advance disaster preparedness

Practical approaches to advance disaster preparedness

This document describes the 'Towards a Safer World initiative' a stock-taking of what has been achieved through the coordinated, multi-sectoral, 'whole-of-society' approach used by pandemic planning during the past five years. The initiative aims to identify which approaches have proved effective and to develop a strategic communications and advocacy campaign to help ensure successes from pandemic preparedness that will be actively replicated in other disaster preparedness programmes.

The goal of the initiative is a world better prepared to respond to threats impacting the whole of society. The objective is to inspire decision makers to act on lessons from pandemic preparedness in order to advance whole-of-society planning for uncertain threats.

The initiative consists of a series of ongoing activities carried out during the period September 2010 to September 2011:

1. The first phase is a data collection exercise from October 2010 to June 2011. Teams representing different disciplines, are documenting the primary achievements and lessons of pandemic preparedness efforts of the last five years under 11 thematic headings: bio-security and animal health; civil-military coordination; communications; community level preparedness; health; humanitarian assistance; logistics; multi-sector preparedness in Asia; private sector preparedness; travel and tourism; and whole of government planning. The teams are developing documents that present key achievements and successes, and recommendations for how to move forward.
2. A strategic advocacy campaign to communicate the research findings to decision makers will be undertaken.
3. Discussion and presentation of the data will take place at a conference to be hosted by UN/WFP in Rome, from 15-16 September 2011. This conference will gather participants from Governments, UN agencies, technical and specialized agencies, NGOs and private companies.