International Recovery Platform

This publication is to help a community make risk-based choices to address vulnerabilities, mitigate hazards and prepare for response to and recovery from hazard events. Risk-based means based on informed choices of alternate unwanted outcomes. In other

This briefing paper provides a synthesis of key lessons learned from relief responses to past earthquakes. The main intended audiences are operational decision-makers and relief programme managers working in the South Asia earthquake relief operation.

Two years have passed since the devastating South Asia tsunami of December 2004. While the world’s focus has largely moved on, the children and families living in the wake of the disaster-many of them in precarious situations before the waves hit-still