- A Beautiful and Deadly Island Volcano From Space – Astronomer and science communicator extraordinaire Phil Plait looks at photos of the eruption of Paluweh, a volcano in Indonesia, taken from the new Landsat satellite.
- Twitter Alerts: Critical information when you need it most – Twitter has launched a new emergency alerting feature that aims to help get high priority information in the hands of people who need it. The alerts are opt-in for both emergency organisations and individuals. Currently only emergency management organisations in the USA, Japan and Korea along with a handful of International Organisations and INGOs are involved in the program. If you’re in a country with twitter mobile activated you can receive SMS notifications, otherwise they occur through pinned tweets and push notifications. If your organisation already has a strong twitter following, it could be a good idea to sign up, the details on how are here.
- Financing Disaster Risk Reduction: A 20 Year Story of International Aid – This new report from the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery and the Overseas Development Institute finds that over the last 20 years a meagre $13.5 billion of development expenditure (less than 0.4%) has been spent on disaster risk reduction. This contrasts to the $862 billion in damage experienced by developing countries and the $93.2 billion the international community spent on emergency response, recovery and reconstruction. The report also reveals huge inequities in the expenditure of this development assistance.
Casus Calamitas 