Topics Covered:
- Disaster and management.
Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI)
What to study?
For Prelims: composition, objectives and significance of CRDI.
For Mains: Disaster preparedness and the need for information sharing and collaboration between various agencies.
Context: At the Leaders’ Dialogue with BRICS Business Council and New Development Bank (NDB), Prime Minister Modi requested the BRICS countries and the NDB to join the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure.
About CDRI:
Launched by Modi in September 2019 at the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit in New York, US.
- A platform where knowledge is generated and exchanged on different aspects of disaster and climate resilience of infrastructure.
- It will create a mechanism to assist countries to upgrade their capacities and practices, with regard to infrastructure development in accordance with their risk context and economic needs.
Benefits and significance:
- This initiative will benefit all sections of society.
- Economically weaker sections of society, women and children, are the most vulnerable to the impacts of disasters and hence, will be benefitted from the improvement of knowledge and practice in creating disaster resilient infrastructure.
- It will also benefit all areas with high disaster risk.
- In India, the north-eastern and Himalayan regions are prone to earthquakes, coastal areas to cyclones and tsunamis and central peninsular region to droughts.
Why do we need a global coalition?
Many countries, including India, have over the years developed robust disaster management practices that have helped in sharply reducing human casualties in a disaster. However, the economic costs of a disaster remain huge, mainly due to the damage caused to big infrastructure.
A global coalition for disaster resilient infrastructure would address concerns that are common to developing and developed countries, small and large economies, countries at early and advanced stages of infrastructure development, and countries that have moderate or high disaster risk.
Sources: pib.
