PDC Updates | May 2, 2008
APEC Dialogue
PDC Chief Information Officer Chris Chiesa, standing at left, shares PDC’s experience with Institutional Collaboration Mechanisms for Emergency Preparedness at an APEC Dialogue in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Vietnam’s National Committee for Search and Rescue co-organized an important meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Hanoi, April 24–25. APEC has 21 member nations, called “member economies,” comprising 41 percent of the world’s population, about 55 percent of world GDP, and 49 percent of world trade. At this scale, the attention of APEC to any issue gives the issue and the solutions considered major significance. Therefore, over time, this “Dialogue Among APEC Economies, International Organizations and the Private Sector on Emergency Preparedness,” could be consequential for billions of people.

Chief Information Officer Chris Chiesa participated in the conference both as co-chair of one of the four sessions convened over two days and by presenting on two subjects central to the theme of the event.

Top officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Committee for Search and Rescue opened the conference. They were followed by Ambassador Juan Carlos Capunay, the 2008 executive director of the APEC Secretariat, who delivered one of the keynote speeches.

Session 1 set the tone for the conference, having high level presenters from both the host country, Vietnam, and Dr. Wei Sen Li, deputy executive secretary of Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction.

Session 2, titled “Sharing Information and Experience of Risk Reduction and Emergency Preparedness…” was chaired by Deputy Director Dr. Hoang Minh Hien of Vietnam’s Disaster Management Center and Mr. Chiesa. Speakers in this session, in addition to Mr. Chiesa, were from Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand. Chiesa’s presentation was titled Achieving Community-based Risk Reduction and Disaster Preparedness through Information Technologies and Applications.

Mr. Chiesa’s second presentation, the last of the conference, was on Institutional Collaboration Mechanisms for Emergency Preparedness. In that closing session, the other speakers were Mr. Neil Head of Emergency Management Australia (EMA); Ms. Christel Rose of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN ISDR) for Asia & Pacific; and Mr. Raul Salazar Cosio of the Diplomatic Academy, Lima, Peru.

Following Chiesa’s presentations, it was recommended by the APEC representative from Vietnam that the APEC Task Force for Emergency Preparedness (TFEP) coordinate more closely with PDC, and a general recommendation was made that APEC TFEP explore the applicability of existing mechanisms supporting regional and sub-regional disaster management information sharing and collaboration, such as PDC’s APNHIN, ASEAN DISCNet, and EMI’s Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Base (DRM KB), as models for APEC TFEP activities. The APEC Chair agreed to further discussion of this with PDC at the August 2008 APEC Disaster Management CEO meeting in Lima, Peru.

For additional information about the subjects in this story, go to the following web resources: