An International Conference on Disaster Reduction (ICDR) is being held in Mumbai at The Leela on 9 and 10 November 2006, sponsored and supported by several global organizations, including IBM.

ICDR 2006 is a follow-up event of UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction held in Kobe, Japan in January 2005 and the World Conference on Disaster Reduction organized in Mumbai nine months later.

This year's ICDR's theme -- 'Mumbai Declaration and Beyond: Public-Private Partnership' -- aims to build further upon the huge success of the event that put India's commercial capital among the global centres that dealt with disaster mitigation and management measures.

The two-day event, an initiative of the Global Forum for Disaster Reduction in association with New Media Communication, is co-organized by Kyoto University and Asian Disaster Reduction Center in Japan. The Conference, for which Israel is a country partner, is expected to attract more than 200 delegates from a dozen countries across five continents.

"ICDR 2006 seeks to explore Public-Private Partnership and draw up a roadmap to facilitate and institutionalize it in order to follow up its outcome with governments, private sector and the organizations that participated in the previous Mumbai conference," said Satya Swaroop, project director, ICDR.

He said the world was passing through rough times with countries grappling with disasters and struggling to cope with their aftermath as had been seen in the recent past in the case of the tsunami, Maharashtra floods and Mumbai blasts to name a few.

"The Conference will make efforts to promote a 'Platform for Public Private Partnership and bring out a Corporate Community Interface handbook in order to raise awareness of the issues involved within the business community," Swaroop said.

The previous conference in Mumbai (visit www.wcdr.gfdr.org for more details) drew all stakeholders from across governments, UN agencies, corporate sector, academic institutions and the community at large.