Europe wants strong national platforms for DRR

MADRID, 8 October 2014 - The 5th European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction (EFDRR) closed today with a strong call for joint action to face the common challenges of climate change, sustainable development and disaster risk reduction.

“The main aim must be to focus on reinforcing the joint actions and strategies,” said meeting co-Chair Daniel Cano from Spain’s Directory General for Civil Protection and Emergencies. “The discussions have shown how the forum is moving forward strongly in addressing the challenges.”

The outcome document from the meeting emphasized the need for effective national coordinating bodies -- national platforms -- to bring together governments and different stakeholders at all levels working in the areas of risk reduction and resilience.

The European conference, the last in a series of regional meetings in the build-up to the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction next year, listed seven areas in which governments and different stakeholders could boost resilience efforts and support the implementation of a post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction.

These included improving coordination of work and knowledge on prevention and mitigation of hazards and disasters, better coordination in the development and dissemination of knowledge and the more effective use of resources.

Local awareness is essential to disaster risk management and needs to be strengthened through national networking and international exchanges of information and best practices, according to the conclusions.

The Madrid conference also called for an adequate international scientific mechanism to aid the better integration of research and scientific assessments of disaster risk into prevention and resilience strategies and actions.

And it urged the UNISDR to integrate the outcomes of European events dedicated to people with disabilities and disaster risk reduction in order to ensure that this features as an important topic on the agenda for the World Conference in Sendai, Japan, next March.

The conclusions from the three-day meeting will feed into ongoing discussions on a new post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction which will revise the existing Hyogo Framework for Action.

“The 5th annual meeting allowed us to pin point priorities and synergies needed to build resilience to disasters with a view to the post-2015 framework,” said Paola Albrito, head of the European office of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).

Both climate change and sustainable development will also be the subject of key international conferences in 2015.