Representatives from ALTER’s lead partners at the National Observatory of Athens will present the project, its objectives, and progress at the 36th General Assembly of the European Seismological Commission. The event will take place in Malta from September 2-7th. The following abstract has been submitted.
Disaster risk reduction initiatives –such as the globally agreed Sendai Framework 2015 – 2030- call for cooperation among all key stakeholders: Public and private sectors, local communities, NGOs, volunteers, and media etc. The ALTER project focuses on creating and testing such an alliance in Armenia for floods originating from dams’ failures due to the occurrence of large earthquakes. Even though major progress has been done in disaster risk reduction in Armenia through UNISDR and World Bank projects, many things have to be done to optimize resilience through cooperation among all major players. The role of ALTER project is to bring experience from European Union Joint Civil Protection Mechanism area to Armenian partners (Armenian Government and key stakeholders) and through certain activities to build long term sustainable coalitions.
This alliance will be based on transfer of methods, tools, knowhow and experience to serve specific objectives:
- Identification and analysis of three (3) pilot areas. According to the special characteristics of each area, a specific set of activities on resilience will be elaborated.
- Design and implementation of an activities package that will increase resilience at the selected areas, underlining the importance of local communities and the cooperation between public and private sectors.
- Improvement of risk management capabilities at local and regional levels.
- Transfer of methods, tools, knowhow and experience for risk management planning and implementation of modern procedures at the selected areas.
- Design, implementation and evaluation of risk awareness and dissemination campaigns to sensitize entities, stakeholders, local communities and general public. Focus will be at pilot territories and key decision makers that can also enable fast transfer of paradigm to other areas of Armenia and neighboring countries (cross border dimension, especially in the case of Georgia).
- Integration, evaluation and continuation of activities through training workshops and small scale exercises. All activities, already in place by other initiatives, that can serve the aim of disaster risk reduction through broad alliances will be used and synergies will be sought and exploited. Furthermore, national and regional policies will be followed to mainstream ALTER project results and ensure their sustainability.
