As world leaders and civil society representatives gather today in Cancun, Mexico, for a biennial United Nations forum on preventing and mitigating disaster impacts, the UN today launched an updated plan to increase the number of cities and towns with the capacity to reduce their disaster losses by 2020.
As world leaders and civil society representatives gather today in Cancun, Mexico, for a biennial United Nations forum on preventing and mitigating disaster impacts, the UN today launched an updated plan to increase the number of cities and towns with the capacity to reduce their disaster losses by 2020.
Announcing a major revision to its Disaster Resilience Scorecard, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) said the changes bring the mechanism into alignment with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the global plan for reducing disaster losses.
It is a major boost to the goal of having more strategies in place at local level for reducing disaster losses from climate change and other risk drivers. This is a key area of focus this week at the UN’s biennial Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction where the Scorecard was launched today. Plans are in place to have 200 cities using it by the end of the year.
“National governments have the primary responsibility of implementing the Sendai Framework working with many stakeholders, and the Scorecard is a valuable support to this work at the local level,” pointed out UNISDR chief Robert Glasser.
Read more at United Nations New Centre
Image: Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, after the April 2015 earthquake. (Credit: UNDP Nepal/Laxmi Prasad Ngakhusi)
