SCO members’ meet: India ready to share disaster risk reduction expertise, says Amit Shah
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 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) member-states, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Thursday while addressing a meeting of the SCO members of disaster management.
This is the first time India is chairing this meeting after becoming a permanent SCO member in 2017, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) stated.
Sources Pakistan, being a member-state, attended the meeting, but virtually.
“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. The challenges of disaster prevention are similar around the world, and that is why we need to learn from each other, innovate and increase mutual cooperation,” an MHA statement quoted him as having said in the meeting.
Shah said that to further strengthen the approach of SCO, five major areas can be identified to work on: Confidence Building Efforts in Asia, Collective Responsibility Approach, Expanding Cooperation in Communication and Information Sharing, Identification of Priority Areas, and use of newly developed technology in disaster resilience capacity-building.
According to the MHA, Shah said that adopting a collective responsibility approach for disaster resilience will help SCO member-states to work together more effectively. Along with this, by pooling resources and expertise, member-states can avoid duplication of efforts and resources, and this will strengthen the region’s overall disaster resilience approach, Shah said.
The MHA said Shah emphasised that unless the members collectively achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the SENDAI Framework Goals, it will be difficult to deliver on the goals set by both these frameworks.
“He said that keeping the above in mind, India has organised two ‘Knowledge Sharing Workshops’ on mitigating the impacts of the earthquakes and the floods and it is heartening to note that all member-states took active participation in both the events, which were concluded successfully,” the MHA said in the statement.
