Strengthening governance on disaster risk reduction through improved disaster damage statistics

The Global Centre for Disaster Statistics was established at the UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction held in March 2015 in Sendai Japan. It aims to support the monitoring and evaluation of progress in implementing the conference’s outcome agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, by providing support at country level for capacity building in developing national statistics on disaster damage and by establishing an improved global database of such statistics. The Centre is hosted at Tohoku University under a unique scheme of cooperation with the UN Development Programme and other partner agencies in Japan. In this paper we provide a short review on the current situation of disaster damage statistics in the world and outline the strategy of the Centre to develop better disaster damage databases and to strengthen the governance on DRR in local/national level through country-based support.