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Call for action on natural hazards and nuclear safety

16 May 2011

More needs to be done to reduce the risks posed by natural hazards to nuclear safety, it has been claimed.

Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), Ban Ki-moon, has called at an international summit for a "coalition of action" to be created in order to address the link.

He stated that a high-level meeting should be planned at the next General Assembly to examine the issue and pressed for measures to ensure local communities have greater resilience to disasters by improving National Platforms.

In his Chair's Summary for the Third Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, the UN chief revealed Japan has offered to act as the host in 2015 for the Third World Conference on Disaster Reduction.

At the conference in Geneva, Margareta Wahlstrom, the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Disaster and Risk Reduction, stated: "Participants at the Third Global Platform have recognized the urgency that we face and realized clearly that the world needed to act quickly and in concrete ways to make the world safer."

The statement was issued in the wake of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which caused substantial damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the north-east of the country.

In 2008, a Ready Rating Program was created in order to provide organizations with a solution that can assist them with preparing for and withstanding disasters and other crises that may affect business continuity.