Venezuela, Bolivarian Rep of

For the third year, Japan hosted a High School Students Summit to mark World Tsunami Awareness Day. UNISDR head, Mami Mizutori, urged them to become youth ambassdors for disaster risk reduction.

A network of hundreds of cities across South America has pledged to step up regional efforts to reduce disaster risk and boost sustainable development.

City mayors today urged national and international leaders to trust and invest more at the local level to transform rapidly expanding urban areas into safe and resilient 21st century cities.

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.

UNISDR's "Making Cities Resilient" campaign received a significant boost today with the announcement that the Ibero-American Union of Municipalities (Unión Iberoamericana de Municipalistas (UIM) is now an official campaign partner.

The UN office for disaster risk reduction, UNISDR, and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability have completed a four-month pilot test of the Local Government Self-Assessment Tool (LG-SAT) designed to help disaster risk reduction efforts in over 1,000 cities and local governments that have signed up to UNISDR's global "Making Cities Resilient" Campaign. LG-SAT has been made possible with funding from the World Bank's Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid branch, ECHO.

Eighteen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have agreed to tighten up on school safety while also integrating disaster risk reduction into the school curriculum, following high-level talks on education in Panama City.