News

Indonesia's National Disaster Mitigation Agency has announced that there will be classes on disaster mitigation at 250,000 schools located in disaster-prone areas. The classes will either be integrated into the curriculum or through extracurricular activities and, unlike previous efforts, anyone can administer them, not just ministry staff.

A new UNESCAP report analyses the impact of disasters on SIDS and maps out the impact on a cluster of SDGs. While the Pacific SIDS are heavily reliant on ocean resources, most of the disasters that affect them are oceanogenic. To build resilient SIDS, there is a need to connect the dots - science, geospatial data, statistics, and policy interfaces.

A religious leader in the Philippines has said that during the post-Typhoon Yolanda recovery, more than 30,000 families have benefited from the Catholic Church's PHP 3.2 billion rehabilitation and reconstruction program. The program is one success amid several innovative accomplishments that have helped the Church implement its recovery projects.

Many rural Tongan women are tackling the various challenges wrought by this year's Cyclone Gita - one of the worst storms to pass Tonga in 60 years - with hard work and leadership. With the help of UN Women, they are responding to the needs of the community, self-mobilizing and connecting with the private sector to secure resources.

New research finds that damage caused by natural disasters and recovery efforts launched in their aftermaths have increased wealth inequality between races in the United States.

Buddhist pagodas are identified as sites of community organization and information dissemination, and would likely serve as important sites for seeking assistance during a major crisis or information dissemination about natural disaster preparedness. These religious institutions could also function as a refuge during or after disasters since they harbour donations.

Certain housing types and housing markets in coastal communities are often overlooked in the disaster recovery process because American housing recovery policy focuses on single-family, owner-occupied housing and neglects single and multi-family rental housing. In turn, coastal vacation homes contend with limited resources for recovery.

Biased disaster mitigation leads to unequal disaster impacts and differential recovery rates in cross-sections of communities. These problems are solvable using an approach that improves biased disaster mitigation by investing in better infrastructure in socially vulnerable neighborhoods and updating recovery policy to not overlook vulnerable households.

According to several reviews, flood protection infrastructure alone does not mitigate flood risk. Unquestioning faith in it can actually deter risk reduction by causing governments to allocate large sums of recovery funding to construct more protective infrastructure without asking why there was failure in the first place.

A new study finds that disasters attributed to other community members — like contagious epidemics — weakened cooperation, increased distrust and led to a long-term reduction in organization building. By contrast, disasters attributed to an act of nature evoked a sense of shared fate that fostered cooperation.