UNDRR News

The Durban Climate Change Adaptation Charter for Local Government adopted yesterday was hailed by UNISDR Chief, Margareta Wahlstrom, as "the best possible start to a critical week in the life of this planet when we so urgently need real leadership on mitigation and adaptation."

Linking disaster risk and climate change is key to reducing the impacts of extreme weather events that have increasingly been on the rise, according to a high level debate today at the Climate Change talks in COP-17 in Durban. The discussions were part of a UNISDR side-event showcasing experiences on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR).

Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) is the driving force behind a major effort to have the voices of cities and local governments heard at the UNFCC-COP17 climate negotiations in Durban.

South African President, Jacob Zuma, borrowed the UNISDR slogan "invest today for a safer tomorrow" when he spoke today at the opening of the Durban Local Government Convention which aims to develop an Adaptation Charter this weekend which will feed into the high-level segment of the UNFCCC-COP17 climate change negotiations.

Feng Min Kan, a Senior Advisor at the UN disaster risk reduction office (UNISDR) admits that not a lot of people immediately see the connection between disasters and AIDS. "It’s just one of those issues that are not very obvious and slips under the radar".

UN disaster risk reduction chief Margareta Wahlström speaking at the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Republic of Korea, said that managing risk is crucial to safeguard investments in poverty-stricken Africa and Asia, where countries can lose as much as a fifth of their GDP to disasters each year.

In Tyrol, Austria, a poster showing a green valley with snow-capped mountains in the distance greeted delegates to a conference on climate change – a beautiful summer scene which hides a potential nightmare scenario for winter tourism in the alps.

It's one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. Over the last twenty years a yearly average of some four million people have been affected by disasters in the Philippines each year and over 33,000 people have lost their lives in 363 major reported events.

Despite the goal set at the Cancun climate talks last year to stabilize the global average temperature increase at 2°C, a forthcoming report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 'Environmental Outlook to 2050' warns that global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to increase.

Following agreement on the Summary for Policymakers, the authors of the 800-page Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) will be busy between now and the end of the year reconciling the changes agreed by IPCC member governments to the Summary with the text of the nine final chapters which will make up the SREX when it is published early next year.