India, UK to host global meet on disaster risk, resilience this week
The Coalition of Disaster Resilient Infrastructure will host the conference that Prime Minister Narendra Modi; UK PM Boris Johnson; PM of Italy Mario Draghi OMRI, and Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, PM of Fiji, will address on day 1 of the 3-day conference beginning Wednesday
A three-day international conference on disaster resilience, to discuss several aspects of disaster preparedness including health and digital infrastructure resilience will begin on Wednesday, March 17.
The Coalition of Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) will host the conference that Prime Minister Narendra Modi; UK PM Boris Johnson; PM of Italy Mario Draghi OMRI, and Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, PM of Fiji, will address on day 1.
“In addition to the pandemic, the world faced massive natural disasters ,including cyclones like Amphan and floods. Take the example of the pandemic, people would think it impacted the hospital and vaccine delivery infrastructure only. But our assessments identified how it impacted the digital infrastructure due to lakhs of people working from home and the transport infrastructure as it had to implement social distancing and other security norms. In addition, rescue efforts of floods and natural hazards had to be conducted with pandemic in mind. Our power and telecom sectors were also impacted,” said Sandeep Poundrik, Director General, CDRI in a press conference on Monday.
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The Coalition of Disaster Resilient Infrastructure was launched in 2019 by PM Modi at the UN Climate Action Summit 2019 held in New York City.
The coalition has 22 members, including Australia, Chile, France, Italy, United Kingdom, United States of America and four member organisations: Asian Development Bank, World Bank, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). In the six months of their functioning before Covid-19 lockdowns were imposed, a study was conducted on Odisha’s power sector and the team is working on a global flagship report on disaster preparedness and resilience across the world which will be launched in 2022.
During the conference from March 17 to March 19, global disaster risk assessments will also be discussed. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union minister for communications, electronics & information technology and law & justice; Nirmala Sithraman, minister of finance and corporate affairs, and Prof. K VijayRaghavan, principal scientific adviser to the government will also speak during the conference.