SCO DISASTER MEET - INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
News: SCO
members must pool resources, expertise on disaster resilience: Amit Shah
What's in the news?
● Union
Home Minister Amit Shah has called on the nations of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation (SCO) to adopt a collective
approach to disaster resilience by pooling resources and expertise and avoiding
the duplication of efforts.
Key takeaways:
● He
was chairing a meeting on the prevention
and elimination of emergency situations, addressing the heads of department
of SCO member states.
● India
assumed the presidency of SCO in 2022.
● Under
the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India attaches special
importance to disaster risk reduction
and is ready to share its expertise and experience in this field for greater cooperation and mutual trust among
SCO member states.
● The
Minister added that each and every life, every family and their livelihood are
priceless and all possible efforts must be made to protect them.
SCO Workshop on Earthquake and Floods:
● India
has organised two knowledge sharing
workshops for SCO members on mitigating the impacts of earthquakes and floods.
● The
Minister identified five major areas
for the SCO to work on. These are
○ Confidence
building efforts in Asia.
○ Collective
responsibility approach.
○ Expanding
cooperation in communication and information sharing.
○ Identification
of priority areas.
○ The
use of newly developed technology in disaster resilience capacity building.
Global Risk Reduction:
● Over
the past few years, the SCO region faced high intensity natural disasters with
huge collateral economic losses, and huge devastation has been caused around the
world by earthquakes, droughts, floods, unpredictable storms, and sea-level
rise which were associated with climate change, and this has become an acute
threat to global development.
● Risk reduction is not a
local matter anymore and an action taken in one part of the world has an impact
on the risk intensity in other parts of the world.
Collective Responsibility:
● Adopting
a collective responsibility approach for
disaster resilience will help SCO member States to work together, more
effectively.
● Along
with this, by pooling our resources and expertise, members can avoid
duplication of efforts and resources, and this will strengthen the region’s
overall disaster resilience approach.
● The
members can expand their cooperation on
emergency situations by exchanging best practices of communication,
coordination of response efforts and real-time information exchange.
Technology Sharing:
● The
members can share their experience and knowledge in the successful use of
technologies, such as artificial
intelligence, remote sensing, drone technology and data analytics to improve
early warning systems, and disaster risk assessment and response.
Go back to basics:
SCO Countries:
● The
bloc currently comprises eight member states - China, India, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan attended the
meeting virtually.
Importance of SCO:
● SCO
would probably be the largest regional organisation in the world, representing
40% of the global population, 25% of the global GDP and 22% of the world’s
total land area.
CDRI:
● The
CDRI is an international coalition of countries, UN agencies, multilateral
development banks, the private sector, and academic institutions that aim to
promote disaster-resilient infrastructure.
● It
was launched by the Indian PM Narendra Modi at the 2019 UN Climate Action
Summit in September 2019.
● CDRI’s
initial focus is on developing
disaster-resilience in ecological, social, and economic infrastructure.
● Objective:
○ To
promote research and knowledge sharing in the fields of infrastructure risk
management, standards, financing, and recovery mechanisms.
● Aim:
○ To
achieve substantial changes in member country's policy frameworks and future
infrastructure investments, along with a major decrease in the economic losses
suffered due to disasters.
Tsunami Early Warning System:
● Tsunami
Early Warning System for the Indian Ocean Rim countries established by the Indian National Centre for Oceanic
Information Services serves not just India but nearly two dozen other
countries.
NDRF:
● India
has deployed its National Disaster Response Force in disaster affected
countries, including Nepal after the 2015 earthquake, and more recently,
Turkey.