An Act to provide for the acquisition for public purposes of waste land in Bangladesh

Palestinian women living in refugee camps and gatherings in Lebanon have little opportunity to realise their HLP rights. They face the double discrimination, challenged by both formal Lebanese law and familial Palestinian social systems.

In 2001, the Lebanese Government passed a law forbidding people who do not hold citizenship to a recognised state from getting property rights in the country. This has left many Palestinian refugees either losing property that they owned, or unable to inherit property from family members.

Land is of tremendous importance in South Sudan. It represents community, belonging and place as well as provides a source of income, subsistence and survival. Control of land and resources was at the centre of the conflict that lasted five decades, leading to South Sudan’s independence in 2011.

The tsunami disaster on 26 December 2004 claimed more than 200,000 lives. It triggered an unprecedented outpouring of reconstruction assistance from both private and public donors.The prompt provision of emergency relief averted the threat of epidemics and prevented major movements of refugees out of the affected regions. However,many of the reconstruction measures failed due to poor coordination between the actors involved and the lack of expertise underlying some of the interventions.The reconstruction effort was also very slow to get off the ground.

2005 was a year of natural disasters.The impacts of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Hurricanes Katrina and Stan, and the Pakistan earthquake prompted calls for better disaster prevention and preparedness systems. Nature's power renders us impotent, but human actions and omissions are clearly worsening the impacts of disasters in some cases.This is where risk reducing measures must lock in, as the last fifteen years of international disaster risk management show.

People-centred early warning systems empower communities to prepare for and confront the power of natural hazards. However, the efficiency of such systems is to be measured in terms of lives saved and reduction in losses, which is directly related to the execution of an anticipated response by the people and institutions once a warning is issued.This paper addresses traditional views on early warning systems, and what it takes to transform them into efficient, people-centred systems.

The series of dramatic natural events is never ending. 2005 again illustrated that natural disasters are unavoidable. For disaster prevention systems to function properly, investments in raising risk awareness are key.

Reports from various NGOs, think-tanks and UN agencies

Articles on this category from BurmaNet News

Articles from this category from BurmaNet News)