Document Actions
Linking culture and disaster
International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and the Mountain Forum are organising a global e-conference on cultural vulnerability to natural hazards from September 22 to October 3, 2008. The focus will be on improving disaster management by locating risk and response in socio-cultural context.
The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and the Mountain Forum are organising a global e-conference on “Culture and Risk: Understanding the Socio-Cultural Settings that Influence Risk from Natural Hazards” from September 22 to October 3 2008.
Strengthening adaptation strategies to climate change is an important component of ICIMOD’s strategy. It requires understanding and accounting for people’s various ways of knowing, beliefs, and perceptions.
Beliefs influence choices about livelihoods, values, priorities, including people’s understanding, perceptions and responses to natural hazards.
However, to date, little attention has been given to how cultural systems influence society’s perceptions of and responses to natural hazards.
This e-conference will address this issue by focusing on cultural vulnerability to natural hazards.
Practitioners, researchers, and policy and decision makers working in the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change need to better understand the linkages between culture and DRR for improved disaster management.
This e-conference is funded by ICIMOD and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) through the project “Too Much Too little water”.
This project is implemented by ICIMOD and its national and international partners to strengthen local adaptation strategies to increased droughts and floods in mountain catchments.
Objectives
• To understand the linkages between culture and risks through sharing and documenting lessons learnt, good practices, stories, and case studies on how belief systems matter in disaster management;
• To provide recommendations to policy and decision makers on how such sensitive and often deeply personal and identifying cultural aspects can be addressed and, to the extent they pose a barrier to vulnerability reduction efforts, how they can be effectively overcome or circumvented
• To map key experts, identify key issues, gaps and research questions, in order to develop a workshop agenda/research proposal to be organised in 2009.
The e-conference will generate a synthesis report and a policy note, which will be made available for download through the e-conference website.
The policy note will also be disseminated by post to the government and UN agencies.
Click here to register.
Contributions are invited in form of case studies, stories, lessons learnt, good or/and bad practices, and images or audio/video clips on the theme(s) of the e-conference to: car@mtnforum.org
Relevant contributions will be acknowledged and shared with the registered participants through the e-conference website and further disseminated through the e-conference publications.
