The Pacific Platform opened today with a strong inclusive presence focused on integrated disaster and climate risk reduction (Photo: SPREP) 

By Andrew McElroy

SUVA, 04 October 2017 – The Pacific region today challenged itself to make disaster risk reduction everybody’s business and convert one of the main calls for action of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction into an everyday reality.

At the opening of the 2017 Joint Pacific Platform for Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Roundtable, in Fiji, more than 200 government officials and representatives from across the development sector agreed that now was the time to move from commitment to action on resilience.

Permanent Secretary for Local Government, Housing and Environment, Government of Fiji, Mr. Joshua Wycliff, led the challenge, and said: “Collective partnership is our strength in the Pacific. But we need to expand this partnership much further to include many others, like the private sector, so that we build resilience.”

The Director-General of the Pacific Community (SPC) Dr. Colin Tukuitonga said it was time to translate the strong spirit of collaboration in the region into substantive partnership. This was needed to deliver on the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific: An Integrated Approach to Address Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management 2017-2030 (FRDP).

“Integration is often over-used in conversation and under-used in practice,” Dr. Tukuitonga said. “We have a shared responsibility to further learn the value of partnership and to be more inclusive. The Framework for Resilient Development has been endorsed by our political leaders. We now have to move forward as part of what is being called the new Pacific Resilience Partnership.”

Deputy Director-General of the Secretariat for the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), Mr. Roger Cornforth, concurred: “There are many examples of climate and disaster resilience in action around the region but so much more needs to be done to better integrate action for the benefit of people on the ground.”

Several such examples of joint action were shared. In the Federated States of Micronesia, North Pacific, at the height of the El Niño-caused drought of 2016, Fais, with a population of 300, was the only one of 19 islands in Yap State that did not require supplies of freshwater.