More Resilient Cities under the Post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

In preparation for the implementation of the post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction, UNISDR (the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction) organized a technical workshop with partners and stakeholders from 2-3 December in Geneva that kicked-off the process for developing local indicators to support implementation of the Framework.

This workshop also served as an opportunity to support three recently launched, multi-stakeholder initiatives, the Medellin Collaboration, the Resilient Cities Accelerator Initiative and the Compact of Mayors, which set out the intention to establish a common data standard for reporting on local climate hazards and risk, and may result in the creation of new standards or the revision and refinement of existing protocols, i.e, the Ten Essentials, Local Government Self-Assessment Tool and UNISDR City Disaster Resilience Scorecard, amongst others

During the event to which METROPOLIS and United Cities and Local Government (UCLG) were invited to, participants stressed the need to adequate assessment tools at the level of knowledge of who uses them because sometimes they cannot be used properly, especially in the context of local governments. Experts also debated on the possibility of unifying the existing tools but they came to the conclusion that if there are so many tools it is because there are many different purposes for using them.

Some of the cities invited to present the tools they use at local level to report and plan insisted on the fact that national financing is crucial for implementing Disaster Risk Reduction policies and correct monitoring. The city of Dakar, member and Regional Secretariat for Africa of METROPOLIS, was invited along with other cities to present its plan to prevent and reduce locally Disaster Risk.

The next step will be presenting the draft indicators developed by the experts group, which is part METROPOLIS in Sendai (Japan) in March 2015 at the occasion of the Third World UN Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.

Find here the full technical note of the workshop.