Road to Sendai: 6th Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction

สวัสดีค่ะ sa-wat-dii, khâ -  A warm hello from Bangkok! I am here all week with some 2,500 5,000 delegates from more than 39 countries in Asia-Pacific who will be tasked to “shape future efforts to build more resilient communities and nations".

The outcome of this meeting will have long-term significance for the world at large as recommendations will feed into a new global agreement on disaster risk reduction (DRR), which will replace the current Hyogo Framework for Action, adopted in 2005 by all UN member-states following the Indian Ocean tsunami.   

"When Asia speaks on disaster risk management, the rest of the world listens. The region suffers more than 80 percent of the world’s disaster events", said Margareta Wahlstrom, UNISDR head and the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General on DRR. “Nine of the world’s 10 most significant natural disasters by fatalities last year occurred in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Japan and China. Some 14,500 lives were lost in tropical cyclones, floods,  heat waves and earthquakes." 

The meeting is the last of the series of regional platforms in the lead-up to the World Conference next March in Sendai, Japan. Second. It is one of the last multi-stakeholder meetings prior to the World Conference, (#WCDRR or 3WCDRR). As such, it's a key opportunity to feed into the drafting process of the second Hyogo Framework for Action (#HFA2).

There is an intense process going on of multiple streams of inputs into the Post-2015 process... and one of these inputs is the HFA2. The second will be a climate change agreement, and the third - the Millenium Development Goals. For more on where we are, I find this diagram really helpful:

Post-2015 process at a glance (Source: www.beyond2015.org)

I will be blogging live this week, and will post a number of interviews to give a flavour of the meeting and provide a glimpse of the happenings of the week. I am also conscious that there are a number of people who perhaps are not able to be in Bangkok but would like to, so please feel free to post, tweet or email questions and I will do my best to respond. So in this way I hope that my presence here would serve to help make the process in the road to Sendai just a bit more inclusive.

ขอขอบคุณคุณ - thanks...looking forward to sharing the week with you!