Yann Zopf, Director, Public Engagement, Tel.: +41 22 869 3618, E-mail: yann.zopf@weforum.org
Mexico City, Mexico, 22 September 2015 – A commemorative event, Resilient Mexico: 30th Anniversary of the Mexico City Earthquake (1985), took place today at the Mexican Chamber of Construction Industry as part of the World Economic Forum’s Disaster Resource Partnership (DRP) initiative. The meeting highlighted the significant progress made by Mexican public and private institutions in structuring and executing collaborative programmes for increasing the country’s resilience to natural disasters.
The event commemorated the 30-year anniversary of the devastating magnitude 8.1 earthquake that hit Mexico not far from its capital city, causing severe casualties and over $11 billion in damage. The earthquake was the most catastrophic in the country’s history.
Natural disasters cause not only physical and human losses; the contingent liabilities from natural hazards also impact national budget balance, restrict fiscal space and hamper economic growth and long-term development. Consequently, effective prevention measures can, in the long run, save money by reducing spending on recovery and reconstruction. To illustrate this point, Sandra Wu Wen-Hsiu, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer, Kokusai Kogyo, Japan, and Co-Chair of the UNISDR Private Sector Alliance for Risk Sensitive Investment (AR!SE), noted that: “Each $1 of investment in disaster preparedness saves $7 when disaster occurs.”
For both structural and non-structural mitigation methods, the private sector is a tremendous source of skills and innovation. Businesses are well-equipped, positioned and increasingly willing to assume a more central role in disaster preparedness and risk mitigation, especially within the communities in which they operate. For example, construction companies help reduce resilience gaps by ensuring the high quality and availability of local building materials by guiding local authorities to enforce building codes, or helping them to develop more local technical capacity.
Initiatives driven by the private sector such as the Forum’s Disaster Resource Partnership are evidence of this shift towards a more proactive approach. Initially designed to improve humanitarian response through the direct application of its technical skills and assets, the DRP now seeks to integrate resilience-building as part of its broader scope. “‘Build back better’ is no longer sufficient; our objective in the future should be to build better from the start,” explained Wu Wen-Hsiu.
International organizations such as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) also manifest a clear interest in increasing private-sector engagement in their work on disaster risk reduction. “The signature of a statement of cooperation between DRP Global and UNISDR at the third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, in March 2015 testifies to this newly emerging trend,” said Pedro Rodrigues de Almeida, Head of Basic Industries at the World Economic Forum.
“A greater awareness of the importance of construction resilience, a broader dissemination of the country’s lessons learned and the engagement of the international community help us consolidate sustained partnerships for a better-prepared Mexico,” said Nicolas Mariscal Torroella, Chairman of the Board of Grupo Marhnos, Mexico, and a DRP member.
Notes to Editors:
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