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Archive - Archive 2004 - July 2013

Seychelles, IOC members receive disaster grant |19 April 2013

This will become possible thanks to a US $543,000 grant for Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) member countries and Zanzibar.

IOC liaison officer for Seychelles Jeanette D’Offay and Julio Serje representing the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) signed the disaster grant agreement for this amount this week.

Principal secretary for environment and energy Wills Agricole and other key actors in disaster management as well as major partners in the south-west of Indian Ocean witnessed the signing.

This was at a two-day inception workshop to launch the IOC risk disaster mechanism project at the International Conference Centre.

This money will allow the various disaster teams to be set up properly in the IOC member countries and Zanzibar. The funds will also be used to seek and develop a tool to mitigate the economic impact of natural disasters through what is called a risk transfer mechanism by establishing what one calls a profile of risks or a very precise and detailed estimate of natural risks plus human, material and economic damages incurred over a period of approximately 20 years forming the basis for the setting up a regional mechanism of insurance.

It will contribute in supporting the countries’ efforts to increase their capacity to systematically account for disaster losses and develop probabilistic estimations of future risks, with an emphasis in weather and climate change-related hazards.

It will also incorporate climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction into the country’s national public investment and development planning system.

The ultimate objective is to provide governments with the basis for calculating how much risk a country must retain and how much it could share through insurance or other means, how much the country should be investing in climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and what an optimal portfolio of adaptation and risk management investments could look like.

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