Reducing Risk Using Micro-finance Tools and Safety Nets

This year, the theme of the ISDR International Day for Disaster Reduction Awareness Campaign aims at increasing disaster resilience using micro-finance and safety nets. The objective is twofold: to sensitize the social and financial communities and institutions on their potential role in reducing disaster risk, and to raise awareness in the disaster and risk management community of the utility of existing financial tools and safety nets to reduce the vulnerability of hazard-prone populations. The rational behind this year’s theme is that hazards pose a major risk for the poor and marginalized, the most vulnerable in society; the destruction of property and livelihoods further entrenches them into poverty. Therefore investing in disaster risk reduction will result in reducing the vulnerability of people to hazards and helps break the vicious cycle of poverty.

For more information visit www.unisdr.org 

In Memoriam

Asian Disaster Preparedness Center deeply regrets the untimely passing away of Dr Raymundo Punongbayan and his colleagues from PHILVOLCS, on 28 April 2005, in a helicopter crash during an aerial landslide survey of the Luzon Province. Dr Punongbayan, a geologist by profession is lauded for having put the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHILVOLCS) on the international map, as an authority on volcanological and seismological phenomenon. It was under his leadership that the Institute successfully managed the 1990 Luzon earthquake, the 1991 Pinatubo eruption, and also forecasted the 1999-2001 Mt Mayon volcanic eruption, averting a major disaster. He will be remembered by the Filipinos for making volcanic and earthquake hazards understandable to the common mass.

ADPC has had the good fortune of having been closely associated with Dr Punongbayan since 1991, while he was the Director of PHILVOLCS and more recently as Executive Director of EMI. In his demise, ADPC and the entire disaster management community has lost yet another mentor and leading spirit.