The UP Resilience Institute and Project NOAH wins Honorable Mention for Early Warning Systems in the Philippines in the inaugural 2022 Averted Disaster Awards (ADA) held at The Understanding Risk Global Forum in Florianopolis, Brazil on November 28 – December 2, 2022.
2022 Averted Disaster Awards held at The Understanding Risk Global Forum in Florianopolis, Brazil. Photo from Averted Disaster Awards Facebook Page.
According to their website, the ADA Prize highlights how successful DRM interventions are rendered invisible as a result of their success, and the corresponding challenges that arise when incentivizing interventions that reduce risk. They further propose the use of counterfactual risk analysis as a means to make ‘avoided disasters’ visible, by shedding light on what could have been had a risk reduction intervention not been implemented. The work will be featured as a contributing paper in the upcoming UNDRR Global Assessment Report 2022.
The Averted Disaster Award is the premier recognition of successful disaster mitigation interventions that go unnoticed precisely because of their success. News rarely highlights the early-warning systems that saved lives in a typhoon as they only focus on catastrophes. Policy makers and society at large tend to undervalue the importance of proactive intervention as success means ‘nothing happens’ in the world of Disaster Risk Management (DRM). The Averted Disaster Award sheds light on successes in DRM to recognize the outstanding work of those who invest in measures that keep communities safe.
The ADA received proposals from all over the world. There were 32 nominated interventions from all continents across the globe with participating countries from: Canada, USA, Brazil, Tanzania, Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Poland, Norway, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Australia, and the Philippines. Types of Hazards Averted or Mitigated include: Cyclone, Earthquakes, Fires, Flood, Food Scarcity, Landslides, Tsunamis, Typhoons and more.
Winners of 2022 ADA can be seen here: https://averteddisasteraward.org/