This speech will look at some of the benefits of working in partnership across the Pacific to better deliver community-driven DRR and preparedness programming. The Australian Humanitarian Partnership (AHP) is a partnership between the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and six Australian NGOs. Disaster READY is a disaster preparedness and resilience program implemented by AHP partners and their local networks in Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Timor-Leste. On behalf of Disaster READY and its partners, Josefa Lalabalavu, Plan International’s Pacific DRM Manager, reflects on some of the successes and challenges of the past four years. He discusses how a strengthened partnership between humanitarian practitioners better supports locally-led responses, which ultimately gives vulnerable communities the tools they need to prepare for and mitigate against disaster.

In this Ignite Stage presentation the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR) will showcase Australia’s new Systemic Disaster Risk Handbook, that AIDR produced in the midst of COVID-19 last year. The new Handbook is cutting edge. It works from the premise that we are in a new era of disaster risk management, the age of taking a hazard-by-hazard risk approach is over and that when we view risk through a systems lens we better understand the dynamic moving parts that make up a system, as well as the people and places affected by our decisions. This reality has been brought into clear focus by the impacts of COVID-19, extreme weather events and compounding disasters in all corners of the globe. The new Handbook presents principles and guidance to support a shift to systemic disaster risk reduction, inclusive governance and decision-making for resilience and sustainability. It supports implementation of the Sendai Framework and Australia’s National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework.

While the Handbook is a core component of Australia’s disaster risk guidance, the principles can be adopted internationally. For example, when confronted with compounding and challenging disasters, thinking globally while acting locally is a must; and the first principle in the Handbook is to ‘Embrace Uncertainty’. COVID has taught us that the changing risk context involves greater uncertainty and that there are many different perspectives to be negotiated. Inclusive approaches to governance and systems thinking can help chart the way forward.

In this session, Amanda Leck will will share the key messages and principles in the Handbook and showcase how decision makers in Australia are leading the way towards systemic disaster risk thinking and action.

Framed in the COVID-19 context, this presentation will provide information on how communities can plan for economic recovery after a disaster through increased focus on disaster financial literacy. The presentation will introduce lessons learned from recent disasters and will provide an overview of currently available resources and tools for disaster planning, opportunities to develop stronger partnerships between community actors, and best practices for utilizing available resources. By the end of the presentation, participants will be able to identify key elements of financial literacy, including critical components of pre-disaster planning, recognize ways to coordinate intermediate and long-term plans among community partners who can support financial recovery, identify elements of a personal and organizational economic recovery plan that incorporates resources from public, private, and volunteer agencies in their communities.

Josh DeVincenzo is a Research Associate II, Sr. Instructional Designer, and Adjunct Lecturer at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness. His focus is on developing learning experiences associated with training projects that navigate disaster preparedness, response, recovery, and resilience. At NCDP, he has developed national scale instructor-led and web-based curricula regarding financial literacy, economic impact analysis, and community partnerships. Josh hopes to create accessible and quality educational programming that benefits the common good at scale, particularly around themes of climate change. Josh has also developed and taught courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Teachers College of Columbia University, the Columbia University Earth Institute Professional Learning Programs, and the School of Professional Studies. Josh is currently an adjunct lecturer at Columbia Climate School’s graduate program on Climate & Society. He holds a master’s degree in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership from the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign and is currently a doctoral candidate in Adult Learning and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on climate pedagogy has been published in the Journal of International Affairs, State of Planet and the Hill.

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) works with local communities and disaster management agencies to map and understand risk by developing comprehensive data sets on buildings, roads, and key lifeline infrastructure data. All disasters begin and end locally. As citizens, we each have valuable, local knowledge of the places we live and the facilities and infrastructure that exists. By capturing and sharing this knowledge on the map, citizens can not only make a meaningful difference in disaster risk reduction and management but become more aware of risks and more resilient in the process.

PhilAWARE and InAWARE are two projects in the Asia-Pacific region that leveraged the knowledge of local citizens to map local infrastructure on OpenStreetMap so that the data can provide critical information to improve risk assessment, early warning, and disaster-management decision making. This intervention will showcase these projects and their impacts in order to inspire new DRR actors to integrate geospatial tools for early warning and early action.

Banten and Central Sulawesi are two areas where earthquakes are often followed by tsunamis. History records that the community has experienced earthquakes and tsunamis for a long time. They have been recorded in Central Sulawesi and Banten. Several of these earthquakes were of quite a large magnitude. These experiences help to produces a variety of different beliefs and knowledge about how to protect oneself from disasters. This knowledge then appears in the form of various traditional ceremonies, stories or fairy tales, or are believed to be Pamali or prohibitions. This knowledge can be used as part of a community-based disaster risk reduction strategy.

This Ignite Stage session will highlight the challenge of preparing people for unprecedented hazards, the frequency of which is increasing as the climate changes. Using a selection of the disasters that followed such extreme events in 2021, lessons learnt in the WMO/WWRP HIWeather project and collected together in the new book, “Towards the Perfect Warning” will be highlighted to show that effective early warnings can prepare people to respond to situations beyond their experience.

Professor Brian Golding is Fellow in Weather Impacts at the Met Office, visiting professor at Bristol University and co-chair of the World Meteorological Organisation’s High Impact Weather project. Brian’s research has spanned numerical modelling, data assimilation, nowcasting, flood and ocean wave prediction, interactive forecaster graphics, and weather impacts in aviation, road maintenance and health. From 2005-2012 he was Deputy Director of Weather Science at the Met Office. He was awarded the OBE for services to weather forecasting and the prediction of hazardous weather.

This side event follows the session on Nature-based Solutions on the morning of the 26th of May. It will look cross-thematically at the Global Platform’s themes and address how Nature-based solutions can contribute to the implementation of the Sendai Framework 2015-2030 and what is still needed at country level. It will also look at what is needed beyond the current framework.

Afghanistan is one of worst natural disaster prone countries in the world. Being a highly mountainous country located in the Himalayan Hindukush mountain region, it is affected by natural disasters such as Earthquake, Flood, Drought and Extreme weather conditions. With over 30 years of conflict, the country lacks infrastructure and capacity to tackle impacts of these natural disasters. Afghanaid leads a group of International NGOs operating in Afghanistan to form a consortium called, the Afghanistan Resilience Consortium or ARC to support Afghan communities fight natural disasters and climate change.

Between 2015 and 2019, ARC implemented a 16m GBP project on Community Based Disaster Risk Reduction (CBDRR) in 705 communities in Afghanistan. Between 2019 - 2021, ARC implemented a 10m GBP project on Ecosystem Based Disaster Risk Reduction (Eco-DRR) in 245 communities, where it used ecosystem restoration and soil-water conservation as its main methodologies. This work not only reduced disaster risk from flash floods, but also improved climate adaptation against drought in a degraded mountain ecosystem like Afghanistan. This short presentation, “Source of Hope (Climate Resilience in Afghanistan)” documents this project.

Nepal is one of the 20 most disaster-prone countries in the world. Lightning was the second most frequent with 354 incidents during 2020 and 2021 according to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) data. These occurrences have resulted in 92 deaths and 338 injured. This presentation will explain how Asian Preparedness Partnership (APP), its national steering committee, the Nepal Preparedness Partnership (NPP), and local partners implement knowledge sharing, organize training to comprehend the risks associated with lightning, conduct lightning risk assessments, support to identify possible risk reduction measures and publish findings to promote information sharing from the community to national levels.

By 2030, 40% of the world will be living in substandard housing, and an increasing number of the global population is at risk of one or more hazards. Yet, despite repeating losses that are disproportionately concentrated in the housing sector during disasters, housing loss is often addressed after the fact. Build Change has identified three key factors for addressing resilient housing: people, money and technology. With a whole of society approach to increase the resilience of houses, we can create a virtuous cycle for a resilient future. Let’s build better now.