On 21 April, ICoE Taipei researchers, members of the ICoE International Advisory Board, and the IRDR Executive Director met with representatives of local governments from New Taipei City and from Hsinchu County, who gave briefings of current implementations and challenges of DRR by two local governments and discussed the mechanism to assist local governments in developing DRR capacity in Taiwan. The discussion included information sharing for plans of disaster risk reduction and operations of emergency response, the annual national-wide evaluation on performance of disaster management at local governments and joint collaborations with local research institutes to provide technical supports.

Locally, ICoE Taipei supports research projects on:

• Impact of climate and land-use change on environmental hazards and adaptation
• Mega-seismic risk and multi-geological disasters in Taiwan
• Open ISDM: Open Information Systems for Disaster Management
• Vulnerability assessment for heat wave and relevant adaptation strategy recommendations

In the course of 2014, the ICoE had elaborated, with input from the IRDR Science Committee, a project entitled “Disaster Risk Reduction and Loss Mitigation.” The project is coordinated, on behalf of the ICoE Taipei, by Dr Wei-Sen Li, Co-Chair of the APEC Emergency Preparedness Working Group and Secretary General, National S&T Center for Disaster Reduction, Taipei.

IRDR SC member Kuniyoshi Takeuchi had participated recently in the ICLEI Congress in Seoul and IRDR will also be represented at the upcoming Resilient Cities meeting of municipal leaders in Bonn.