Interview with Paola Albrito of the UNISDR Regional Office for Europe

Paola Albrito headed the Regional Office for Europe of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). In this interview she explained what the office does and why it took part in ENHANCE.

UNISDR is the UN focal point for disaster reduction. In 2013 it monitored the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015, ran the PreventionWeb platform and produced the Global Assessment Report. She noted that UN General Assembly resolution 67/209 of December 2012 had convened the Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, to be held in Japan in 2015.

UNISDR’s role in ENHANCE was to link research results to European policymakers and to raise awareness of them. Albrito also named a specific interest: insurance and reinsurance as tools for transferring risk.

She summarised the outcomes of the Fourth Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, held in Geneva in May 2013, where Tarja Halonen, former President of Finland, moderated one of the sessions. She also mentioned the annual European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction (EFDRR).

Her policy message was about coordination. Disaster risk cuts across sectors, so policies need to be coordinated across them too, and she pointed to national platforms for disaster risk reduction as the mechanism for doing that.

The conference she anticipated produced the Sendai Framework in March 2015 (see the glossary). Her colleague Margareta Wahlström, head of UNISDR, gave ENHANCE a separate interview in 2014. UNISDR appears in the partners list.