Honduras

Question: What are the greatest challenges facing your city? In the past we have built immovable pillars for policy and normative issues by topic so it is a challenge to empower actors in different institutions. We have regional and global frameworks but we need to translate these to the city level and we need to find ways to finance them.

The Americas Regional Platform had a wide-ranging discussion on the development of disaster risk reduction in Central America since Hurricane Mitch twenty years ago.

Deploying the power of technology worldwide and ensuring that communities know how to act in an emergency are the keys to curbing the risks posed by tsunamis, experts said this week.

The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) aim to reduce disaster losses in some of the world’s most hazard prone cities with the initial aid of a €6 million grant from the EU, over the next three years.

This publication aims to shed some light on women’s capabilities to take leading roles in building disaster resilience. It features women as drivers of change in different socio-economic contexts, and under various gender conditions.

While the examples

The biggest challenge facing next year’s UN World Conference to agree a new global DRR framework, is how to integrate disaster risk reduction (DRR) into national development plans, Margareta Wahlström, Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), said on Wednesday.

A senior official from the Philippines town of San Francisco, which won the 2011 Sasakawa Award for Disaster Risk Reduction, has spent the last five days journeying across Central America to exchange information with local authorities on best practice to make urban settings safer from natural hazards.

This regional report presents local and regional activities in Latin America and the Caribbean related to disaster reduction and sustainable mountain development as part of the 2002 UNISDR campaign.

The magnitude 4.0 earthquake recorded off the coast of Antigua on 11 May is "a warning that the Caribbean should prepare for a much more severe earthquake to come," says a leading expert.

This monthly newsletter highlights UNISDR activities around the world. This issue reports on: (i) the progresses on the "Making Cities Resilient" Campaign and the release of the Handbook for local government leaders: how to make cities more resilient; (ii