16 September 2010 (Nanjing, China)
The ADRC attended the Preparatory Meeting for the High-level Expert Group Meeting towards Developing a Roadmap to Reduce Flood Disaster Risks in Pakistan held on 16 September 2010 in Nanjing, China. The Preparatory Meeting was organized by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).
The meeting was opened jointly with the Stakeholder Meeting on the Regional Cooperative Mechanism on Disaster Monitoring and Early Warning, Particularly Drought in the same venue, and was started with a moment of silence for the victims of the Pakistan Floods and China landslides that happed in July/August 2010. Dr.Xuan Zengpei, Director of the Information and Communications Technology and Disaster Risk Reduction Division (IDD) of ESCAP, delivered a statement of Dr. Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Secretary of ESCAP.
Following the opening session and setting the scene, Mr. Ahmed Amjad Ali, Deputy Head of Mission and Alternate Permanent Representative of Pakistan to ESCAP made presentation briefly on the current situations of flooding damage of Pakistan. He stressed that unprecedented floods affected the entire length of Pakistan, causing maximum damage in province of Khyber Pakhtunkwa (KPK), Punjab and Sindh. The number of affected people by the floods is more than 20 million and is larger than the Pakistan Earthquake 2005, the Hurricane Katrina 2005, the Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004, the Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 all put together.
Each and all participants made presentations and brainstormed on how they could provide potential assistance to reduce flood disaster risk in Pakistan.
The High-level Expert Group Meeting will be held in Pakistan in early November 2010.
For more details, please visit the following web site.
http://www.unescap.org/idd/events/2010_Pakistan_Floods/
(2010/09/16 17:30)