World Conference on Disaster Reduction is a United Nations

United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

 conference bringing together government officials, non-governmental experts and other specialists from around the world to discuss the growing trend of people affected by natural disaster

Natural disaster

A natural disaster is the effect of a natural hazard . It leads to financial, environmental or human losses...

s.

A WCDR conference was held in Kobe, Japan January 18–22, 2005. This conference took on particular poignancy coming almost 10 years to the day after the Great Hanshin earthquake

Great Hanshin earthquake

The Great Hanshin earthquake, or Kobe earthquake, was an earthquake that occurred on Tuesday, January 17, 1995, at 05:46 JST in the southern part of Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. It measured 6.8 on the moment magnitude scale , and Mj7.3 on JMA magnitude scale. The tremors lasted for approximately 20...

 in Kobe and less than a month after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea megathrust earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on Sunday, December 26, 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The quake itself is known by the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake...

 and resulting tsunami

Tsunami

A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...

. Japan's long history of severe natural disasters, prominence in international humanitarian aid and development and scientific achievements monitoring dangerous natural phenomena also made it a suitable conference venue.

The Conference adopted plans to put in place an International Early Warning Programme

International Early Warning Programme

The International Early Warning Programme , was first proposed at the Second International Early Warning Conference in 2003 in Bonn, Germany...

 (IEWP), which was first proposed at the Second International Conference on Early Warning in 2003 in Bonn, Germany.

Conference objective

To find ways to reduce the toll of disaster

Disaster

A disaster is a natural or man-made hazard that has come to fruition, resulting in an event of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the environment...

s through preparation, ultimately to reduce human casualties. Due to the proximity to the devastating tsunami, developing a global tsunami warning systems was high on the agenda. Other topics include:

• pledges to reduce disaster damage
• healthcare after disaster
• early warning systems
• safe building standards
• agree upon cost-effective preventative countermeasures
• a global database on relief and reconstruction and a centre on water hazards

The Pacific Rim Tsunami Warning system is an example of a cost-effective warning system; its yearly operating cost is approximately USD 4 million. The yearly operating cost of a hypothetical global warning system is estimated at USD $30 million. This cost, compared to the international aid donations of nearly USD $8 billion for the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, clearly demonstrates the cost effectiveness of such a system.

Participants

Initially the conference did not garner much attention but due to the recent disasters, the attendance grew dramatically and the international media focused on the event. Emperor Akihito opened the conference and welcomed 4,000 participants from around the world from the following organizations and functions:

• Experts and scientists from 150 countries
• Government officials
• United Nations
• NGOs

Hyogo Framework for Action

The Hyogo Framework for Action was an outcome of the 2005 conference held in Kobe, Japan. The HFA suggests five specific priorities for action:

1. Making disaster risk reduction a priority;
2. Improving risk information and early warning;
3. Building a culture of safety and resilience;
4. Reducing the risks in key sectors;
5. Strengthening preparedness for response.

See also

• Business continuity planning
  Business continuity planning
  Business continuity planning “identifies [an] organization's exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, whilst maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity”. It is also called...
  
  
• Data recovery
  Data recovery
  Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives, solid-state drives , USB flash drive,...
  
  
• Emergency management
  Emergency management
  Emergency management is the generic name of an interdisciplinary field dealing with the strategic organizational management processes used to protect critical assets of an organization from hazard risks that can cause events like disasters or catastrophes and to ensure the continuance of the...
  
  
• Humanitarian aid
  Humanitarian aid
  Humanitarian aid is material or logistical assistance provided for humanitarian purposes, typically in response to humanitarian crises including natural disaster and man-made disaster. The primary objective of humanitarian aid is to save lives, alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity...
  
  
• Disaster
  Disaster
  A disaster is a natural or man-made hazard that has come to fruition, resulting in an event of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the environment...
  
  

External links

• Official WCDR Site
• Timetable for Kobe conference in PDF
  Portable Document Format
  Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
  
  format