Mayors meet in Cartagena to share plans for reducing disaster losses
By Brigitte Leoni
CARTAGENA, 21 June 2018 – Representatives of five cities in the Americas met this week in Colombia at the Sixth Regional Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction to discuss progress against the Sendai Framework, the global plan to reduce disaster losses by 2030.
Santo Domingo Este in the Dominican Republic, Guayaquil in Ecuador, Guatemala City in Guatemala, San Juan de Lurigancho in Peru and Tegucigalpa in Honduras are among twenty cities that have been chosen globally to take part in a three-year programme called Making cities sustainable and resilient: Implementing the Sendai framework for Disaster Risk reduction 2015-2030 at the local level, launched in 2016.
The initiative, launched by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the European Commission, supports local governments to better manage disaster risks.
Alfredo Martinez from the city of Santo Domingo Este was the first mayor to officially present his municipal disaster risk reduction plan at the workshop, Sharing experiences: Making cities sustainable and resilient in the Americas.
“Before this initiative, we did not have a plan. Now we have one; this is a big change for us and we are very committed to implement it,” he said.
“The initiative helped us in setting up a municipal committee on disaster reduction which reinforced disaster risk reduction activities and policies in the city.”
The Cartagena workshop follows a training of trainers on developing and implementing disaster risk reduction action plans, which was held recently at UNISDR's Global Education and Training Institute in Incheon, Republic of Korea.
“The programme has forced us to take disaster risk reduction as a main city priority, and this has had an immediate positive effect when we have had to manage the eruption of the Fuego volcano which happened only 50 km from the City of Guatemala”, said Jonathan Del Cid, one of the main municipal coordinators of the programme in Guatemala City.