The Avoidable Deaths Network (ADN) has launched a global campaign declaring 12 March as the International Awareness Day for Avoidable Deaths (IAD4AD).
Purpose: To raise the visibility of disaster deaths and missing persons while both capturing their impact on people's lives and by providing a platform wherein policy makers, practitioners and researchers have the ability to make more informed decisions that lead to lives saved.
Goal: To capture the causes and circumstances that lead to disaster deaths so that national and local responders can put context-specific interventions in place to save lives.
Impact: Through our work, we strive to reduce the actual number of deaths from disasters and give light to the value of the lives that have been saved through effective disaster risk governance, preventable and timely interventions.
International Awareness Day for Avoidable Deaths will be celebrated annually. We invite and encourage individuals, communities, and organisations worldwide to celebrate this day and raise awareness of avoidable disaster deaths that are taking place in their respective cities, towns, and villages.
We will conduct a mid-term evaluation in 2028 to take stock of this campaign. After 2033, we will drop the word ‘Awareness’ and then continue to celebrate 12 March as International Day for Avoidable Deaths (ID4AD).
We will provide the updates of this global campaign through the ADN’s Voluntary Committments Platform for the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030.
Purpose
Climate-related and geophysical disasters between 1998 and 2017 led to the deaths of: “1.3 million people and left a further 4.4 billion injured, homeless, displaced or in need of emergency assistance. While the majority of fatalities were due to geophysical events, mostly earthquakes and tsunamis, 91% of all disasters were caused by floods, storms, droughts, heatwaves, and other extreme weather events” (UNISDR, 2018: 3). Although deaths from the direct impact of disasters (aka direct disaster deaths) are recorded by the major databases, indirect disaster deaths and missing persons are currently not recorded. Also, the voices of the survivors and the circumstances under which disaster deaths occur are currently lacking. The purpose of this global campaign is fourfold:
- to raise the visibility of disaster deaths, especially indirect disaster deaths and missing persons and capture their impact on people’s lives and livelihoods;
-to capture the ‘causes and circumstances’ that lead to disaster deaths so that context-specific interventions can be put in place to save lives;
-to promote the slogan ‘Disaster Deaths Are Avoidable’. They are avoidable by putting preventable, amenable and risk governance measures in place; and
-to reduce the actual number of deaths from disasters, value the number of lives saved and the saved lives.
