Students attend the UN Geneva Seminar Series on 12 October (Photo: UNISDR)

By Brigitte Leoni

12 October 2017 - Valentina comes from Nancy and Agathe from Strasbourg. They are completing their final year at university and are among 150 students who are attending a two-day UN Geneva Seminar series on disaster risk reduction that started today. 

“We are very keen to learn more about these issues as we do not really discuss them at school. This is a great opportunity for us to become more familiar with the broader UN agenda, and understand it from a different perspective,” said Agathe. 

The event “Reducing Disaster Risks to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals” jointly organized for the first time by the UN Office for Disaster Risk reduction and the Department of Public Information (DPI) of the UN Office at Geneva (UNOG) could not have been “more timely”, said Kirsi Madi, Director of UNISDR in her opening remarks. 

“This year has been a record year; so many devastating disasters all over the world have shown that the decisions we make can increase or decrease the impact of disasters,“ she said. 

The two-day event brings experts in disaster risk reduction and representatives from countries recently hit by disasters including the Sierra Leone ambassador to the UN, Ms Yvette Stevens. As many as 1,000 people are reported to have died in the mudslide which struck a district of the capital, Freetown.