SRSG Mizutori's remarks at the Launch of the Centre of Excellence for Climate and Disaster Resilience

STATEMENT BY SRSG MAMI MIZUTORI ON THE CREATION OF A CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CLIMATE AND DISASTER RESILIENCE

I am very pleased to join the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, Professor Petteri Taalas, to announce our intention to create a Centre of Excellence for Climate and Disaster Resilience.

This new Centre will concentrate minds on what extreme weather and other natural and manmade hazards means for daily life on planet Earth for the foreseeable future and spur efforts to adapt and cope with that harsh reality.

Both WMO and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction now share the same premises and will work more closely than ever before.

Both UN agencies, we realize that climate change is no longer simply about the weather and its impact. We aim to do a much better job of explaining to governments and civil society and all other stakeholders on how extreme weather interacts with other hazards, and how the underlying drivers of disaster risk  amplify disaster impacts in unprecedented ways.

Disaster risk is systemic and deeply embedded in our development processes. It arises most commonly from weak governance, poverty, global warming, poor land use planning, environmental degradation, and disease outbreaks. The list is frightfully long.

This Centre of Excellence aims to promote efforts to better understand the importance of the collection of loss and damage data especially in developing countries so that policymakers and politicians can make better decisions on how to invest scarce resources in the right areas to prevent future disaster events and to reduce existing levels of risk.

We aim to enhance international cooperation to developing countries desperately in need of financial and technological support, and capacity development  to implement  climate change adaptation policies and improve their disaster risk management.

The Centre of Excellence will convene climate and disaster risk thought-leaders and practitioners to advance joint-research, policies, and capacity-building, in a manner that will influence and strengthen existing national adaptation plans in line with the Paris Agreement, and national disaster risk reduction strategies in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The Centre will seek to promote emerging approaches and key scientific and socio-economic issues for reducing disaster risks in this world of growing uncertainties

We will pay particular attention to the needs of Least Developed Countries, Small Island Developing States and Land-Locked Developing countries, many of which do not have access to multi-hazard early warning systems and lack the means to develop and implement a national strategy for disaster risk reduction.

Today we celebrate the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, and this year’s focus around this day is to enhance international cooperation to developing countries in support of their efforts to implement the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the global blueprint for resilience.

We, UNDRR and WMO,  hope that this Centre will grow with many other organizations joining our venture, so that together we can make  an invaluable contribution to protect lives and livelihoods and economies from disasters.