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Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment Meeting, November 18 - 19, Suva, Fiji

Saturday, 13 November 2010 09:58 administrator
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SOPAC will host the second project meeting on a joint initiative by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and SOPAC on Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing.

The purpose of the meeting is to review progress in collecting building, infrastructure, population and crop data to determine the level of risk faced by Pacific island countries.

Scientists at the meeting will review the research and modeling into the impact of disasters, including tropical cyclones, earthquakes, and tsunami in the Pacific Islands.

Participants will also discuss ways in which this information can be made accessible to decision and policy makers to help reduce the risk of disasters in the Pacific Island countries.

The importance of sustaining the initiative beyond the lifetime of the project will also be addressed.

The meeting will be attended by the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, GNS Science (New Zealand), AIR Worldwide (US), Pacific Disaster Centre (US) and SOPAC, all project partners.

 

Last Updated on Saturday, 13 November 2010 10:01  

Newsflash

Wednesday 10 July 2013, Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), Suva, Fiji – With the increasing flow of funding into the Pacific region for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation projects, it is essential to combine the perspectives of different sciences for effective outcomes. This is a key message from the Joint Meeting of the Pacific Platform for Disaster Risk Management and the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable currently underway in Nadi, Fiji.

‘There are a lot of people with good intentions who want to do something useful about climate change adaptation,’ says Dr Arthur Webb of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC).  ‘But for successful adaptation, we have to combine the sciences.’

‘You can have a technically sound climate change adaptation project, but if you don’t engage the social sciences in explaining activities to the community then the project will be less effective or could even fail,’ says Dr Webb, who manages SPC’s Oceans and Islands Programme.

‘If you have one group of scientists working to inform a community about something and they leave out another group of scientists with different and relevant expertise, then you don’t get the full picture.’

‘On the other hand, there are good examples of community disaster risk and climate change adaptation projects where the application of technical scientific principles is being combined with social science perspectives to ensure that critical aspects, such as communication and livelihoods, are taken into consideration,’ he says.