Human and animal health and wellbeing are linked and interdependent in many complex and varied ways. With our vision for a future rich in wildlife, Zoos Victoria achieved the status of the world’s first carbon neutral zoo in 2011. We see our commitment to achieving the SDGs and our role in addressing the systemic disaster and climate risks to wildlife and our natural environment as critical to preserve species and life on our planet.

UNOSAT presents on the use of satellite imagery for improved disaster risk reduction at the local and regional level. This presentation focuses on the use of practical tools as well as capacity development at the national level. Examples of such tools include AI derived flood monitoring and decision support systems for relocating coastal communities exposed to climate change.

In Indonesia, a 2016 flash flood occurred in Cimanuk Watershed, Garut District, resulting in more than 2,525 people being displaced. Research shows how relocation affects community resilience in the ten relocation sites in Garut, Indonesia, by assessing the risk perception. This research proposed Urban Living Labs (ULL) as an innovative approach to address the gap and contribute to long-term sustainability by actively co-constructing durable solutions for the displacement issue. This ULL is expected to mainstream the measures to establish a durable solution to the displacement issue.

Fly for Humanity is a youth initiative that optimizes the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or Drones for the sake of humanity. They consider disaster risk reduction, emergency response, and rehabilitation. This initiative is a collaboration between Sky Volunteer (Synersia Foundation), U-INSPIRE Indonesia, and other stakeholders from the Pentahelix network. Fly for Humanity has flown all over Indonesia since 2018 and is currently scaling up.

CARI! is a research & ICT-based start-up providing end-to-end disaster-related knowledge management products & services in Indonesia and ASEAN region. In-house technologies developed by CARI! produced a search engine that curates and geo-tags disaster-related scientific publications, sourced from various global repositories. As a social venture, the search engine of CARI! is free to use by everyone. Leveraging its wealthy data & knowledge base, CARI! provides tailor-made resilience intelligence, ICT & system integration solutions, capacity building, and strategic planning.

This presentation elaborates on effective national response mechanisms in Cambodia which aim to reduce the impacts and damage caused by natural disasters, particularly flooding. Additionally, the national strategies focus on capacity building for vulnerable communities as well as the use of technologies and information sharing to prepare and update these communities of disaster events.

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.

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.

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.