UNDRR News

The Mayor of Mashad, Seyed Mohammad Pezhman, is leading a major push for more Iranian cities to join UNISDR's "Making Cities Resilient" campaign as ten cities from disaster-prone Khorasan Razavi Province in north-eastern Iran signed up to the campaign yesterday.

The United Nations office for disaster risk reduction, UNISDR, today officially welcomed five members of parliament from Bangladesh, Uganda, Cambodia, Senegal and the East African Legislative Assembly as parliamentary champions committed to promoting legislation for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

The UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative, Margareta Wahlström today said Google and other providers of information can make an important contribution to raising awareness about disaster risk reduction in disaster-prone countries.

The two largest and most destructive forest fires in Colorado’s history yesterday prompted U.S. President Barack Obama to issue a disaster declaration for the state.

The Indonesian government today announced details of the Fifth Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction which it will host in October as the region counts the cost of record-breaking disaster losses over the last year. Indonesia made disaster risk reduction a national priority following the 2004 Asian tsunami.

The largest UN summit ever organized closes today with an urgent worldwide call for accelerated implementation of the international blueprint for disaster risk reduction agreed by all UN member States seven years ago.

The UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, used yesterday's UNISDR "Resilient Cities" event at Rio+20 to make an urgent appeal for scientists to use plain language if they are to play a larger role in policymaking on climate change.

The UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, Margareta Wahlström, today welcomed the US City of San Francisco as both a role model and the first major US city to join the Making Cities Resilient Campaign which seeks to saves lives and reduce economic losses in member cities.

A meeting of 1,000 business executives gathered at Rio+20 heard a passionate plea for resilience from Aris Papadopoulos, CEO of Titan America, a large cement manufacturer, who is also chairman of UNISDR's Private Sector Advisory Group.

Around 200 legislators from 74 countries and the European Union met yesterday on the sidelines of the UN Rio+20 sustainable development conference to approve a "Legislators' Protocol," containing a set of "Rio Scrutiny Principles" to strengthen legislators' capacity to hold governments to account on promises made at development conferences including Rio+20.