Building regional partnerships for reducing disaster risk in Middle East and North Africa

Ever increasing numbers of natural hazards (particularly as a result of earthquakes and floods) occur in the Middle Eastern and North African countries. More than 26,000 people were killed in 2003 in the Bam earthquake in Iran and another 2,200 died in the Boumerdes’s earthquake in Algeria. Several hundred of people suffered from severe floods between 2004 and 2006 in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.