UN Leads Asia-Pacific Closer To Universal Standards For Disaster Statistics

By Minggu Simon Lhasa BANGKOK, Oct 31 (Bernama) -- Responding to the call by governments of the region, an expert group has set a plan to urgently develop agreed statistical standards suitable for the Asia-Pacific region on the occurrence and impacts of disasters suitable for the region by 2016. Senior experts from governments, academia and international organisations this week reached a milestone towards better disaster risk management in Asia and the Pacific, at a United Nations (UN)-led meeting in Sendai, Japan, according to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap). Escap said, concerned by the frequency of natural disasters occurring in the region, the experts agreed on the core principles for establishing a common basic range of disaster-related statistics. Over the past three decades, almost 1.2 million people in Asia and the Pacific have lost their lives to disasters. Efforts to manage disaster risks in Asia and the Pacific, as well as in the rest of the world, have long been hampered by the lack of timely, reliable and comparable statistics, mainly due to the absence of common standards, said Escap. Thus, earlier this year, governments of the region decided to act to close this gap and establish the Expert Group on Disaster-related Statistics in Asia and the Pacific. Developing a set of common standards will allow more precise risk assessment across the region and help governments in evidence-based policy-making which provides the right support and infrastructure to manage the risks of disasters. The group’s first meeting was held in Sendai, from Oct 27-29 by Escap, the Tohoku University and the United Nations Development Programme, in collaboration with the Government of Japan and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. In his opening remarks, Escap’s East and North-East Asia (Escap-Enea) Office director, Kilaparti Ramakrishna said: "With climate change, the frequency and severity of extreme weather events are expected to rise. "This means, there is a tremendous need for better disaster risk management for society and the environment." Tohoku University president Professor Susumu Satomi noted that without statistical standards, governments could only infer but had no way to determine with certainty, the extent to which disaster events inflicted damage and losses to the "hard-earned fruit of development" in their countries. -- BERNAMA