TBGer Tabitha Tattenbach Attending Drought Resilience +10 Conference in Switzerland
TBGer Tabitha Tattenbach will be attending the Drought Resilience +10 Conference in Geneva, Switzerland September 30 to October 2. This conference is the first high-level follow up on the National Drought Policies Conference in 2013.
From the conference website:
In 2013, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration with a number of UN agencies, international and regional organizations and key national agencies organized the High-Level Meeting on National Drought Policy (HMNDP) in Geneva from March 11 to 15, 2013. The theme of the HMNDP was “Reducing Societal Vulnerability – Helping Society (Communities and Sectors).”
10 years later, many drought management initiatives and partnerships have been created based on the 2013 conference. Significant progress has been made worldwide in shifting from a reactive, crisis-oriented, to a proactive, forward-looking approach to integrated drought management. However, we are seeing that, overall, drought risk is increasing in the world. Drought events are becoming more frequent and intense, vulnerable populations and ecosystems are underrepresented in management decisions, and often political attention and finance are lagging behind what would be needed to increase drought resilience globally.
The Drought Resilience +10 Conference, which will be held from September 30 to October 2, 2024 in Geneva, Switzerland (WMO Headquarters), is going to bring countries together to review progress and lessons learnt and to explore and define a joint way forward towards a drought-resilient world.
Goals of the conference:
_Reflect on successes and challenges of 10 years of drought risk management since 2013 to learn how to achieve drought resilience in the next decade
_Consolidate and plan jointly how drought resilience can be brought to scale to respond to the accelerating impacts of climate change in the next decade by applying systems thinking
_Work with political leaders to strengthen awareness, mobilize resources, prioritize drought and increase commitments to building drought resilience and to implement Integrated Drought Management
_Drought Resilience +10 actively promotes the inclusion of youth and gender equality, which requires session organizers to have at least: 40% women participation in panels and 1 speaker under the age of 35.
The conference aims on scaling up and accelerating drought action on the ground – and as a landscape architecture firm in Texas, we’re interested in learning more and contributing in helpful ways because so many of our cities face water issues and intense drought periods.
For more on the conference, check out the conference website here.