Update

Major roll-outs of UNISDR's Making Cities Resilient campaign in Austria and Iran were outlined yesterday at the 4th International Disaster and Risk Conference, in Davos, Switzerland, which has brought together experts from around the world.

Even by the standards of one of the world's most disaster-prone countries, the August floods which hit Manila and other parts of the Philippines have been devastating. Latest reports indicate that four million people have been affected and as many as one million people are living with relatives or in evacuation centres.

The Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, Sir John Beddington, recently spoke to UNISDR about how migration triggered by natural hazards is actually taking people into areas of increasing vulnerability.

UNDP Administrator, Helen Clark, said today the agency intends to double its overall support for disaster reduction over the next five years and will add five countries per year to the "growing list of countries on track to becoming champions in disaster resilience."

Mexico is in the grips of one of the worst droughts in 70 years - a catastrophe which has devastated agricultural production for over one year now. According to the National Water Commission the prolonged drought has affected 70 percent of the country and decimated agriculture in the states of Aguascalientes, Coahuila, Durango, San Luis Potosí, Sonora, Tamaulipas, and Zacatecas, among others.

A new study by UNICEF and UNESCO is a timely assessment of just how some countries are faring, or not, with the implementation of disaster risk reduction education seven years after such education was requested by the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA).

Following 12 days of rains brought on by seasonal southwest monsoons, there are signs that the chronic floods which have submerged 50 percent of Manila as well as nearby areas are abating.

UNISDR Parliamentary Champion for Disaster Risk Reduction, Abdou Sané, Member of Parliament from Senegal, recently welcomed the African Union's decision to establish an African Risk Capacity Secretariat - a specialized agency of the African Union which will help elaborate a legal agreement on a pooled risk insurance facility for droughts, floods, earthquakes and cyclones.

A series of radio and television commercials aimed at educating and sensitizing millions of viewers in the Philippines about disaster risk reduction have just begun airing throughout the disaster prone south-east Asian nation.

Japanese school children have asked the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, Margareta Wahlström, to make sure that children's views are taken into account in the consultations on a new framework agreement on disaster risk reduction to succeed the Hyogo Framework for Action.