Symposium on Making cities resilient: how local governments can reduce disaster risks realigning with Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction: Book of abstracts

“Making Cities Resilient” is a global campaign which is led by The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and its partners. This campaign addresses issues of local governance and urban risk in the broader scope of managing disaster risks and works towards sustainable urbanisation by taking proactive actions. The main feature of this campaign is that it is a city-driven approach with an aim to raise the profile of resilience and disaster risk reduction among local governments and urban communities worldwide. This campaign also serves as a mean of supporting the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030) following on from its earlier support on the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), 2005-2015.
Global Disaster Resilience Centre (GDRC) at the University of Huddersfield has been a long-standing advocate of the programme and its members have played a key role in making the Manchester a “role model city” in the campaign.
Sri Lanka as a country can benefit from this programme immensely, specially in making plans to reduce long standing disaster risks in some of its cities. Undoubtedly, the higher education institutions can play a major role in such attempts contributing to both strategic and operational planning and policy making to manage localised disaster risk reductions.
It is therefore with great pleasure that we welcome delegates to this 14 days research training event and for the Symposium on Making cities resilient: how local governments can reduce disaster risks realigning with Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. The symposium was organised as part of RECADOS– TM training event on “Making Cities Resilient around the world”. RECADOS–TM is a European Commission funded Erasmas+ International Credit Mobility (ICM) project which support student and staff mobility to and from countries outside Europe. Accordingly, this research training programme and Symposium is designed as a research capacity building and awareness programme targeting the disaster management researchers in the main higher education institutions in Sri Lanka.