Conference "Understanding Risk Central America"

UNESCO Office in San Jose will participate in the Conference "Understanding Risk Central America" (URCA), which will take place in San Jose, Costa Rica from 12 to 14 February 2020. Together with UNDRR, UNESCO will organize the session Técnicas de Fuego: Voces y acciones, which aims to facilitate dialogue and identify the importance of the link between cultural heritage and disaster risk management.
URCA is an international conference that targets to build strategic alliances for the integration of resources and forces from the experts, organizations, academic institutions and other key actors within and beyond this area. Such alliance would serve the comprehensive and in-depth understanding of risks, in order to enhance resilience and action. Based on its mechanism of regional collaboration and integration, URCA intends to present best practices and innovative methods for combating disaster and climate risks. It will explore a variety of issues that range from disruptive technologies to community participation, which would all contribute to the improvement of disaster risk management in this region.
Within this framework, the participating experts and speakers will hold discussions on the relationship between the protection of cultural heritage and disaster risk reduction. It targets to acknowledge that the inclusion and integration of the challenges of protection and the consideration of the specific vulnerabilities of cultural heritage could contribute to a transversal strategy for disaster risk reduction at the local level. Based on this consensus, it is necessary to incorporate the protection of cultural heritage in decision-making and policy processes at institutional and operational levels.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), through the Global Campaign "Developing Resilient Cities: My City is Prepared!" will address issues of local governance and urban risk in order to help governments to understand and reduce risk and to increase their resilience through the local application of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030.