21st World conference on disaster management (WCDM) 2011
The World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM) is proud to be the premier annual event for disaster management professionals, providing a global perspective on current issues and concerns in the industry.
This coming conference will cover the following topics:
Pandemic planning
Planning for a pandemic is essential. Being informed and knowing what to do will help minimize the impact in our daily lives at home and at work. With the outbreak of the H1N1 employers of all sizes developed or reviewed and updated plans to respond to this influenza now and during the upcoming fall and winter influenza season.
Natural disasters
The frequency and impact of natural disasters are on the rise worldwide. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, forest fires, tornados, ice storms and severe rain storms are happening more often than ever before.
The 20th WCDM will discuss real events and lessons learned that will help organisations with their own disaster preparedness plan to identify available resources and strategies to mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from natural disasters.
Climate change
Disaster Management professionals should be equipped to understand factors and repercussions that impact business and communities alike. Climate change is no longer a vague threat. The effects of a changing climate are already being felt around the world: powerful hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves, increasing forest-fire counts and blizzards.
The global challenge as disaster management professionals is—What can they do? What are the economic effects? What type of planning should they be doing? What can they do, if anything, to influence politicians and business leaders?
Corporate resilience
To ensure that organizations can bounce back quickly from disaster or crisis large or small they have to ensure that they have a resiliency plan. If they have strong principles for their corporate resiliency, the organization will be able to be competitive and maintain full or partial business operations during and after a disaster or crisis.
The 20th WCDM will take the “complexity” out of understanding how resiliency plays an integral part of their operations and how they can remain competitive during a disaster or crisis.
Corporate planning/preparedness
Every community can be easily disrupted by an emergency. This can seriously affect the lives, economy and environment of its residents. This could take the form of a severe storm, flood, forest or structural fire, chemical spill, pandemic outbreak or similar disasters.
Are they prepared to respond and provide help to your community when a disaster or crisis occurs? Do they have the resources, tools and plan to respond? Do the community residents know what to do when a disaster or crisis occurs?
Business continuity
Building a framework that not only is simple to implement, but also includes safety, response, risk analysis, recovery strategies, plan development, plan testing, maintenance and awareness programs is sometimes a difficult task.
Furthermore there will be poster presentations which poses an excellent opportunity to review experts' work, listen to a brief presentation of each poster presenter as well as network one-on-one with these presenters.