 Welcome. My name is Michelle Klein-Solomon from the International Organization for Migration and the Director of the Migrants and Countries and Crisis Initiative, Secretariat, which we're going to hear about this government-led initiative in just a moment. It's my pleasure to welcome you all here today for this discussion on the importance of and how to integrate migrants in disaster risk production and disaster management strategies. We have today participant meetings with us from around the world, more than 250 people from as far away as New Zealand to the Americas. Thank you very much to all of you for joining us, including yet challenging hours of the day. We have a very rich program ahead of us, and it is my pleasure to introduce and spend just a minute about the program today. As I said, we'll be talking about the Migrants and Countries and Crisis Initiative, which is co-chaired by the governments of the United States and the Philippines, and we're very fortunate to have with us today Ambassador Cecilia Revon of the Philippines, the Ambassador here in Geneva to the United Nations. She will be our first speaker. She will be followed immediately by two speakers from the U.S. co-chair, who are actually joining us from Washington today. One from U.S. citizen services, consular affairs, working on the protection of Americans overseas, and the second from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which works on protecting people in the United States, and in this case, migrants in the United States. Then it will be my pleasure to turn to our partner in the U.N. system, UNISDR, who I'm happy to have with us today, John Harding, to talk about policy development at the global level, in particular the Sendai framework for action, and the integration of migrants into that. We'll then turn to our two sets of expert presenters. One set joining us from California, from California State University, looking at preparedness-related issues. And secondly, joining us from New Zealand, from the CLEAN group, and I hope they'll tell us about what that means, looking at recovery-related measures on behalf of migrants affected by disasters. But you'll hear more from each of them. And then we'll have a moderated discussion, and you'll have an opportunity to pose questions online. I have two colleagues with me here from the Migrants and Countries in Crisis Initiative Secretariat, Tiara Milano and Lorenzo Jovanio, who are moderating this discussion, and are taking questions by chat, which will then be posed to the presenters. With that, let me turn now to our first speaker, Ambassador Revo from the Philippines. You have the floor. Thank you very much, Shelly, and well, good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are, good evening, or wrong. I am so happy to join this Miki webinar this afternoon on a very important topic, very important to the Philippines. As you know, the Miki Initiative, as Michelle has said, is a column by the Philippines and the United States that was born out of the need to address protection gaps. For migrants who are caught in crisis, who are caught in crisis, when they strive for natural disasters, as we have seen and experienced when many of us responded to the recent crisis in the Middle East and North Africa region, I mean, by we, I mean the governments, IOS, International Organizations, IOM, UNSCR, civil society, actors, and many other groups. The series of Miki, regional, and specific stakeholders' consultations so far have stressed the importance of establishing effective measures before a crisis hits to reduce the risks to which migrants are exposed in a country of destination. Now, the Philippines, with its 7,999,000 citizens overseas as of December 31, have developed some effective measures or practices in this aspect. The Philippines, while at the beginning I'd like to say the Philippines is one of the countries that worked hard, and I would say very hard for the inclusion of or reference the role of migrants in the Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction 2015-2013. I never thought that it would be that difficult. The Sendai framework clearly recognizes the role of migrants in the PRR. Well, I will not go into details because my colleague here, my friend, from UNSCR will talk about this later. But for the purpose of this webinar I would like to share with you three examples of measures that the Philippine government has adopted to help protect or prepare Filipino migrants and migrant workers when crises hit the country where they are in. The first one is the mandatory membership of Filipino migrant workers in our social security system. Or, and the workers welfare fund and other protection programs prior to departure. So everybody who lives as migrant workers who lives for abroad, they are mandated by law to register or enroll in our social security system and in the workers welfare fund which really help migrants when crisis happens in the countries where they are in. The second one is the mandatory prep departure orientation seminar where those who are living for overseas employment are briefed about the country of destination where they are going. You know, the history, the culture, the customs and tradition of this particular country. They are also briefed about their rights as migrant workers, as migrants and they are briefed about the assistance that are available to them from several Philippine government agencies abroad. This prep departure orientation seminar is normally, I would say, the world so to speak when they arrive in their country of destination our embassies for consulates abroad do the post arrival orientation seminar with the same features. The third one is the institutionalization of our diplomatic and consular missions abroad as a way of safety net ready to assist any and all Filipino migrants in stress abroad. The Philippines has a global network of 82 embassies and consulates, 166 honorary consulates and at least 1,200 personnel who are mandated by law to render 24-7 services to overseas Filipinos and I am referring to consular services, labor and welfare services, legal services and repatriation assistance. The personal of the embassies and the consulates and representatives of various government agencies abroad who are involved in assisting migrant communities just like the Department of Labor and Employment, the overseas workers welfare administration, the Department of Social Welfare Development, yes we employ welfare personnel in countries where their services are needed. They are as one country team under the leadership of the ambassador or the consulate general. All of these personnel undergo intensive prayer departure orientation program to prepare them to provide 24-7 services to Filipinos. Philippine missions in countries where we have big number of overseas Filipinos maintain and regularly update database of Filipinos in their areas of jurisdiction and I think this is very important. We have to know where everybody is so that when crisis hits whether it's strife, political strife or natural disasters then it would be easy for this one country team to reach them and help and at the same time ask the help of diaspora communities to assist other members of the communities. Now, aside from database of Filipinos their missions abroad maintain contingency plans and these contingency plans are regularly updated. In some areas, like for example in the Middle East aside from contingency plans for example in one country we also have a sub-regional or a regional contingency plan because when disasters hit or crisis happen then we have to repatriate or send assistance to the Filipinos it is not only one country that is involved you have to go to other countries in the region to seek their assistance and operation so contingency plans is not only for the country for the particular country where they are in but we have a sub-regional or a regional contingency plan. These are just some of the examples of measures which have proved to be very effective for our efforts to expand assistance to overseas Filipinos and I would like to emphasize that these contingency plans that I have mentioned involve the diaspora. We have a system where we have leaders from different Filipino community groups and they undergo training and briefing also so when disaster happens the embassy or the consulates will call on all these leaders of the Filipino community to determine whether there are Filipinos who are affected how to make sure that everybody work together to ensure their safety. Well, as I said these measures have proved to be very effective and I think this is some of the things that we can share with other countries. Before ending my short remarks I just wanted to point out that the NICI initiative offers the opportunity for governments, civil society actors private sector employers and recruiters and international organizations to enhance multi-stakeholder coordination in countries of origin, transit and destination of migrants to reduce their vulnerabilities in the face of crisis. In June this year we hope that the drafting of the NICI's voluntary and non-binding support guidelines and practices will be finished. At that time we will offer to all these stakeholders we will offer this as a tool that may be used by all stakeholders in responding to the protection needs of migrants in countries in crisis. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Masler for coming in we do all have a lot to learn from the Philippines example and thank you very much. Let me turn now to our U.S. co-chairs to Tom Keating who is with the American Citizens Services of the U.S. Department of State from the Bureau of Consular Affairs to be followed by Carol Cameron who is the Director of International Affairs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency both in Washington. I turn over to our colleagues in Washington you have the floor. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello everyone. I'm very happy to participate on behalf of the State Department today. I've been asked to give the perspective of a country of origin so I wanted to talk a little bit about how the State Department works to build the resilience of our American citizen communities overseas and really underline the importance of information in that process. When a crisis hits we want our citizens to know how to respond so that they can not only help themselves but help each other. So information is a really major factor in what we do to try to build that resilience before a crisis hits for our citizens overseas. The first one I want to talk about is something we call the Local Resources Initiative. This asks the question what do U.S. citizens typically need when emergencies arise overseas and to what extent are these resources available to U.S. citizens in each country? So what we've done is we've surveyed our posts overseas our consulates and embassies to ask what resources were available locally including shelters food banks assistance for U.S. citizen children etc. We're gathering that information making it available to our citizens in those countries. One of the great things about this program is it not only highlights the existing services it helps us identify gaps where there are not resources available to our citizens overseas and we're encouraging our embassies and consulates to work with local partners to fill those gaps in resources. A second is the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program or STEP. STEP allows American citizens to enroll with our embassies and consulates overseas. We've had more than 8 million U.S. citizens enroll in STEP since it began in 2004. So when you enroll in STEP you provide some contact information for the embassy but you also start receiving time-sensitive safety and security information about the country you're living in. STEP is also a really critical tool for our consular officers when we have a U.S. citizen that's been reported missing. It helps our consular officers try to locate that person so STEP is a very critical piece in our information infrastructure. As a compliment to STEP we're also expanding our use of social media to reach our citizens with timely information. In the recent Paris terror attack Twitter was a major element of our getting our message out to our citizens in the hours and days following the attacks. On Facebook there's a new feature that we've been using where the Facebook whenever there's a crisis can turn on the safety check feature that allows anybody in that country that's being affected by the crisis to mark themselves as safe this oftentimes makes it easier for family and friends back home to know that their family members is safe near the crisis and it eliminates the need for the embassy to get involved in trying to locate the person so that we can use our resources to the folks that have not been accounted for yet. Social media has been a big part of that. I also wanted to talk about our American liaison network. This was formally known as the warden system which is a network of private U.S. citizens that live in each country. Those citizens partner with our embassies and have a lot of influence to assist U.S. citizens in crisis. The old warden system was more of a passive institution that would more or less pass messages from the embassy to citizens but what we've done with the American liaison network now is we're trying to make it more of a continuous collaborative communication tool between our consular sections and U.S. citizen communities to understand the needs of our citizens and better respond to those needs. Finally I just wanted to talk about our web presence and what we're doing to improve the delivery of information through the web. Travel.state.gov is our flagship website for providing information to the American traveling public and what we're doing is we're redesigning the website to make it work better on smartphones and other mobile devices. We're also simplifying the consular information products that are on travel.state.gov to make them shorter, easier to read and hopefully get the message out to our citizens. It would be easier for them to take in those messages when we believe they're designed for reading on the web. Finally, we're also redesigning each of our embassy websites. We want to make them uniform in structures so that when you go to the U.S. Embassy Buenos Aires website you're familiar with the structure from having used it when you went to the U.S. Embassy Rome website for example. We want them all to be consistent and easier to navigate so we're working hard to make sure that not only we have good content and good information through our website that it's going to be easier for our citizens to access that information. In conclusion, we believe all these tools are going to help our citizens be better informed so that they're prepared for when a crisis hits. We think that having these tools will give them the knowledge and confidence to help themselves help each other to supplement the support that our citizens receive from our embassies and consulates after a crisis hit. With that, I'll turn it over to my colleague Carol Cameron from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Thank you very much, Tom. Go ahead, Carol. We look forward to hearing from you. Good evening. As you know, every day people all across the world prepare for and face disasters both natural and man-made. And like you, FEMA really knows that the welfare and safety of hundreds if not thousands of survivors are often jeopardized due to their immigration status. Today I'm going to share some information from the perspective of the country of destination. I'll touch a little bit, if you go to the next slide, on the vulnerabilities that we see with migrants, but also to touch a bit legally and, you know, who are full-time resident students, we also have available resources for them in times of disaster. There are a lot of barriers for migrants and they face hurdles unlike any other group that we have in the United States. Often they do not understand the guidance that we're giving them due to language barriers and it's difficult for them to understand direction from emergency management authorities concerning evacuation. And we often see that they will refuse to go to an evacuation site because of their legal status. They also fear taking advantage of emergency shelter and, you know, once again due to their immigration status. So one of the things that we do, we work very closely with faith-based organizations here in the United States to bridge that. And many migrants know that churches are safe havens where they can go in times of disaster. And what we also find is, regardless of the status, a lot of foreign nationals don't really understand that there are services that are available to them in the United States if a disaster strikes. All foreign nationals, regardless of their status, can receive shelter, food, water, emergency relief supplies such as diapers and cleaning supplies and basic for state if they're caught up in a disaster. And one of the things that your countries can do is to encourage anyone who's traveling on a visa to the United States to register with their respective embassy or consulate when they get into the United States. We have a very active program with the State Department counselor services and we work closely with consulates and embassies in large cities all across the United States to make sure that officials at the embassies and consulates understand what help is available for their citizens who may be impacted by a disaster. And lastly, Tom was mentioning relocation services for American citizens abroad but we also have relocation services here in the United States for foreign nationals who maybe have lost their family perhaps someone was at work and the children were at school and they got separated. So there are relocation services and once again the respective embassy and consulate knows how to get in touch with those services to help impacted foreign nationals. And lastly I think the most important thing is to remind everyone that they need to know their risk and they need to know what to do. And we always encourage everyone to use social media go online take a look at the websites that are available up there for FEMA the Red Cross the National Hurricane Center and Facebook is also a wonderful tool to use where they get information from their friends and family. Many times during a disaster we start receiving lots of calls from parents overseas who are eager to find their sons or daughters who are in college and we're finding now that if people go to Facebook it's a much easier way for them to connect. And I think more importantly than anything else the key to survival is evacuation. If you're directed by a local official to evacuate you really need to do so. You need to follow those instructions and get out of the way of the disaster and the emergency responders that are coming in to help. And also as Tom mentioned there are many smartphone applications out there that are available for all of the entities like the Red Cross and FEMA that people can go to to see what is available in the disaster. So with that I'll close and hopefully we're on time. Thank you very much. Thank you very much both Tom and Carol. It was wonderful to have both of our co-chairs the MICIC initiative share with us the many very concrete and practical steps that they are looking at both from the perspective of countries of origin and protecting your citizens overseas and also with respect to protecting migrants in your countries. With that let me turn to our partner John Harding from UNISDR in the UN system to talk about policy development and particularly the send out framework John thank you for being with us. Thank you Michelle and good day to all the participants. We very appreciated to be here today to discuss this interrelation between migrants and the disaster risk. I think it's a topical issue and I will mention in a few minutes why it's a topical issue but it's also not an easy one to address and that's why we're very appreciative of that IOM and the support of the governments that have initiated this opportunity to make it to discuss and look at good practices in this regard. One of the reasons why it is a topical issue to us is that last year as mentioned by Ambassador Reborn countries came together with lots of stakeholders after quite a long consultative process and they came up with an ambitious plan framework for the next 15 years on how to address disaster risk. It's useful to remind us what the background for those discussions overall while in countries the number of people who are dying from disasters globally and in most regions that's actually been trending down which is encouraging because there are effective systems in place in countries in the Philippines who are warning the populations when disasters occur. Overall the level of exposure and the number of people who are potentially affected by disasters is trending up and the economic exposure for example is trending up faster than the economic economies are growing so it remains a very big concern for countries and communities overall. Actually for the first time last year we were able to put a figure on the projected annual losses every year to disasters and the 314 billion is basically what we have to put aside every year looking forward to dealing with the impact of disasters on their economies and of course it's not just an economic issue it's the key to being effective. So the standard framework basically recognises that we can address this risk and we can address it through the development processes, the investments, the daily investments to which risks are being increased and unfortunately we are in a position now where we have a much stronger understanding of the processes to which risk is being created and therefore we can address them. The challenge for countries of course is when we are dealing with very dynamic environments there are factors like climate change, population growth which are particularly challenging to take into consideration when we are trying to look at the movement of people is one of those dynamic challenges that countries are having to address and in migration displacements of your patients it's very much part of the equation when we're talking about countries of managing their risk to disasters. The standard framework actually has through the leadership of some partners, some countries who are particularly cognizant of this issue but that was quite a forward looking at how to address this migration and displacement and that's very encouraging actually if you look over the last 10 years there's been a real shift in the thinking of the relationships and disasters and magnets and if I go back 10 years ago we basically talked about displacement basically people who were displaced and from then we moved to a recognition that actually migrants were part of the at-risk population to a better recognition that relocation is a policy option for countries to deal with the risk and today if you look in the context of the standard framework migrants are actually identifying an active stakeholder in the discussions in the decisions making processes that are required to address the particularly part of the solution and I think that's obviously a very forward looking perspective now that we have in the context of the standard framework we have a bank consciousness provided us with that framework now obviously having it in the standard framework is one thing putting it into practice because obviously this is quite challenging and I think we need to take these good commitments and nicely how we operationalize it I think these opportunities that we have now to hear some very practical examples of how that is done is a good one and we should continue sharing those and promoting them as a good start and I mean just to finish and to reflect how I do face that I've actually just recently spent in Haiti managing one of the supporting the Haitian government manage their disaster risk management program and working with the protection institutions there on putting in place their propane capacity their warning systems and so on and with the current political situation with the neighboring country with the Dominican Republic we do have quite a large displaced population along the boundary and while we did have humanitarian programs that were assisting those communities was that challenging for us to actually integrate them within the either on the tender side or along the term equity to build the resilience of the Haitian population and that was both because of dynamics within the government the dynamics within our international institutions and of course so not only when I was there, I was fortunate that Haiti wasn't affected by a large hurricane this year but it was not too bad I can tell you that if it had they would have been on the first line and then none of our plans, none of our warning systems were targeting them so I know that this issue will hopefully come up in the next hurricane season hopefully we'll have made some progress but also we're going to miss the opportunity because these are people who have spent their lives living in the Dominican Republic they speak Spanish they don't speak the local language and they also come from a country that is quite advanced in their approaches and we've had quite a lot to contribute to the local community and I didn't know when it comes to understand how to address risk and that's a bit of context so I just want to use that as an example to say that it's very important to have this in their framework because we have a real challenge in putting that in place through our collective programs that stop here Thank you Thank you very much John Sendai is a watershed moment there's no question and I actually put the portion together with Lorenzo to be part of our team to help work with governments and others to integrate migrants and I thought your challenge to us to really watch what implementation is that he and I thought your presentation particularly noted that not only do migrants have specific vulnerabilities and maybe you missed in disaster preparedness and measures in response but they can also be a question perhaps in reducing risk and managing risk and that's a core message to take away. Thank you very much Let me now turn to the third segment of our session today to invite our local practitioners to talk both first about preparedness related measures and then recovery measures On the preparedness side we're fortunate to have with us today Honale Martinez I hope I pronounced your name correctly She joins us from San Marcos California State Universities in San Marcos faculty and we're fortunate Professor of Anthropology working with the National Latino Research Center We'll have her CV available online so you can learn more You have the floor now without Amanda, we look forward to you Good morning Thank you all for your attention and your invitation to participate this morning I'm really honored to be part of international like this with our experience during Southern California with the 2007 wildfires that happened that really shook our work as researchers and agency members who work with immigrant communities in the border region to its core. We were obviously in a period of chaos during this time and it really made us realize the importance of preparing for disaster not only for ourselves but for the communities that we are working with. And in this case, it was immigrant farm workers from the Southern California region. As my colleagues who have spoke already today have already emphasized, immigrants are especially vulnerable as a whole on a day-to-day basis. And in times of disaster, these vulnerabilities are even more pronounced. And these are just a few of the highlights of some of the vulnerabilities for immigrants in Southern California, very similar to what my colleagues have already mentioned. A sense of isolation, high poverty levels, which put people at risk daily. Immigration status as well, which was mentioned by our FEMA representative, is a huge barrier for immigrants living in the border region here, primarily from Mexico. They also face inequalities and a lack of access to services, healthcare services, social service agency service as well. There is a huge culture of fear in Southern California due to the fact that a lot of our community residents don't have authorized citizenship or residents here in the United States. And not only that, there's a large history and ongoing issue of racism and discrimination against immigrants here due to the large undocumented immigrant community that we have. And finally, a lack of awareness among agencies which really became pronounced during the wildfires. Now, our work prior to the fires, we had been working on a large grant that allowed us to do some community organizing. And we were a coalition called the Farm Worker Care Coalition here in San Diego County. It's a coalition of close to probably over 30 agencies from researchers to community clinics, to the Red Cross, to housing agencies, clinics. Like I said, we were founded in 2004 and prior to the wildfires, we had been doing some community organizing where we were training immigrant farm workers to be leaders in their own communities and to take initiative to help educate and inform their fellow community residents on their rights, to legal health services, as well as other health issues. When the fires sit in 2007, as I mentioned before, it was a very chaotic time, 10 days of this disaster. As a coalition, we were obviously trying to make sure our own families were secure during this time, but we quickly started getting reports from the field that the farm worker communities were especially vulnerable, were being evacuated but didn't know where to go, were being asked for ID and shelters, were being turned away from services that they should otherwise have access to, as our colleague mentioned. But when a chaos ensues like this, oftentimes the reality is that people are denied services and things happen that deny people their basic civil rights during a disaster. There were about five areas of impact that I'm gonna quickly go over because I think we've already talked about some of these issues. One was being the obvious lack of preparedness among immigrants due to their already invisible status in our society here in the United States. And also when we get ideas about how to prepare, when you ask a community resident who's a working poor person to have $200 cash with them and extra medication in the event of a disaster, it's not really a very realistic expectation. The evacuation was quite disastrous here, literally in Southern California with people at stops like this one here in this picture. Border patrol was highly present during evacuation, which was very intimidating to people who were undocumented and in some cases, people would choose to stay inside their house during an evacuation rather than expose themselves to possibly being deported. Within the shelters, there was a huge lack of cultural sensitivity. People were being asked for the identification. Again, a huge barrier for those community residents who don't have their documentation here. So what happened was a lot of people didn't use the shelters and instead they went and they relied on their own networks and their own networks of houses and apartments. And so you had people in their own homes with 10, 20 people also there and they quickly ran out of food and resources as well. As a result of the wildfires, there was a lot of impact economically because people lost work. Some people lost their homes entirely when they were burnt down. People lost access to food and water and had a lot of mental health and coping issues as well. So what emerged and I quickly just went over sort of what happened here in San Diego. What emerged from this was that we quickly realized as a coalition that we had to do more during disaster because it was evident that the local authorities and the emergency management groups in San Diego were not familiar with the special vulnerabilities based by immigrants and they were unprepared to answer and to handle the special needs of this community in the times of disaster. And so we set out to first we documented the issues and then we got some funding from the state of California to prepare an emergency preparedness plan for immigrant farm workers in San Diego. And we have six strategies that we focused on to help our capacity because we quickly realized that we can't do it all, that we need to work with FEMA. We need to work with the Office of Emergency Services and with the Red Cross here in San Diego. So we quickly built our partnerships and we were quickly told by the Office of Emergency Services of the Red Cross that if we wanted to be a part of a larger preparedness plan that we needed to use the same structure that agencies here in the United States use from the very top to the local level which is called an incident command structure and I'll go into that in a few minutes. So building our partnerships was very important during the fire if we realized that we can't do it all like I said before, we were collecting food, we were doing all we could and we realized that we are not equipped to do some of these things where other agencies are. We realized we needed to find the partners who are specialized in those areas. Another thing that we did was we started to work with the community health workers, the community outreach workers that have been part of this grant to involve them in this process and the things that we did was we developed an emergency preparedness curriculum for immigrant farm workers very tailored specifically to this community to help and increase their capacity to be prepared in disaster and we used to train the trainer type model where these community health workers were trained to deliver this curriculum among their friends and family members in the communities most vulnerable. We also involved the community in training like CPR first aid like you can see here, a community emergency response team and they've actually created their own community emergency response team in one of the local communities here and they have the gear and the training to respond during disaster to do basic first aid to help people who are trapped, other types of emergency things until first responders can get there. And we also educated them on their rights during a disaster because a lot of people don't know what their rights are as far as access to services and that they can't be denied aid and services based on their documented status. We also had to advocate for the community with not only disaster providers, but local agencies get the information out there about the special barriers to services and the barriers that immigrants face during disaster. We built up our assets and we created an asset map to help build our capacity and have linkages with churches with ethnic media like radio stations and television that can be an asset to us during a disaster to get information out, food banks, fire stations, all of these things were part of our asset building. We also tried to build our own capacity and this is probably one of the biggest accomplishments of our coalition, which was to develop an incident command structure, to our community of immigrants here in San Diego. We've done simulations, we worked closely with the Office of Emergency Services in San Diego County as well as the Red Cross who helped us develop our incident command structure. And what basically this is for those of you who are unfamiliar, it's a chain of command during a disaster that's used, like I said, all the way from FEMA down to a local emergency with the fire department. And this provides clear roles and a chain of command for disasters so that you're not completely unorganized like we were in 2007, which can be very overwhelming and ineffective. So as you can see down at the very bottom where the red boxes are, these divisions that we have listed here are actually community health workers who are actual immigrants in the community, part of the structure who work on the local level to get information out and to assess issues and they communicate that all the way up to the chain of command. And then things are coordinated at the top with Office of Emergency Services, with the Red Cross to get aid out or whatever needs to happen so that we're organized for the next disaster. Here's the example of one of our job actions sheets for one of these roles. And we have these for each role in our structure. We finally had to make sure that if we build this plan, are we gonna get the cooperation and the buy-in from the Office of Emergency Services from local police officers from fire departments? So they're aware that we're organized and they're aware that we wanna be part of this to make sure that people don't get and fall from the cracks like they did during 2007. So some of the lessons learned I wanted to share with you just to sort of remind you that one agency can't do it all, you have to work in collaboration and the coalition like we have. Immigrants will be disproportionately affected just as they are daily and vulnerable in many of countries around the world. In disaster, it's more pronounced and you should expect that. Things get chaotic and it will be a mess but the more organized you can get, the better. It's key to involve the community in any plans and from the bottom up, they have a lot of to contribute and should be an intricate part of any sort of emergency plan. It's key to build your partnerships now rather than in the middle of a disaster, you're not gonna have time to find out what assets that you might need. I really encourage making a plan and keeping it updated. We have a plan that we designed but already I can tell you that 60% of the people on that incident command structure have moved on to other positions where their grants no longer exist and so they're not integrally involved in this topic anymore. So you have to continually look for partners. You have to continually update your personnel, keep training and keep that contact with the community. And I just wanted to thank you for your time. We have a series of reports. We have an actual copy of the disaster preparedness plan if you'd like to see it on our website as well as the report that looks at sort of the impacts on the local immigrant communities. And we have a short video on YouTube about our coalition and some of the work that we've done in this area if you'd like to check that out. So thank you very much for your time and I'll turn it back over to you. Who's liking? Thank you very much for your presentation. That was excellent. And I think responds exactly to what Joan said which is we really need to translate into reality the goals, the objectives that were set out in Sendai. And this is a fantastic example of learning from a difficult experience and learning well. Thank you very much for sharing that with us. Let me move now to a different part of the world, clearly across the world actually, to the Kling Group, to Wayne Reed and Sally Carlin who will make a joint presentation focused not as we just did on the preparedness phase but specifically on the recovery phase. You have the floor. Thank you very much for joining us. Good morning everybody or maybe good evening, wherever you are. I'd also like to mention that we've got Sarah Thompson with us as well who's one of the representatives on Kling from the Pacific communities. So Kling is a collaboration, much like our colleague previously was saying. We also realized that it's necessary to work together. So the groups that are involved in Kling are a whole mix of agencies, including local and central government agencies, migrant and refugee support groups, health agencies and other groups such as interpreting services, the Human Rights Commission, Planes FM which is a community radio session. If we go to the next slide please. These are some of the acronyms we might use called particularly culturally and linguistically diverse. It's the term that's used in New Zealand to refer to communities, not necessarily speaking English and from different cultural backgrounds. Next slide please. Could we go to, thank you. So just a bit of context then. In September 2010, there was a 7.1 magnitude earthquake here which caused quite a lot of damage to particularly underground infrastructure and weakened some of the buildings but one of the key learnings is that we didn't learn too much from that earthquake and then less than six months later there was a second earthquake of lesser magnitude but caused significantly more damage. Lots of buildings destroyed and 185 people lost their lives. And then there were more than 15,000 aftershocks in the period since September 2010 including some major aftershocks in June and December 2011 and our most recent big aftershock was just two weeks ago actually another 5.7 earthquake and we wanted to mention that to kind of highlight that this is still ongoing and some of the mental health issues in particular keep being brought up by these ongoing seismic activity. Next slide please. I don't want to touch too much on demographics but around 11.7% of the wider Christchurch area comes from a non-English speaking background and we've included Pacific peoples, Asian and of course the Middle East and Latin American and African group most of whom are from refugee backgrounds. There's around 46,000 people. We have around 170 cultures and 80 different languages being spoken in Christchurch which does present a major headache in communication. Next slide please. We had a meeting at one of the local Māori meeting places everybody seemed to gravitate to this area three weeks, sorry, three days after the event. One of the logistical difficulties that we came across that most people had lost their databases that were on hard drives that were in buildings that were either damaged, destroyed or just not able to access. I know several people have been talking about communication we found that mobile phone networks were very erratic and often down so we were left with no distribution at all. We were trying to get information out to the communities because of the damaged infrastructure it was almost impossible to get into some of the communities. Information, sorry, one size doesn't fit all and this goes back to the difference in cultures. Translating and interpreting, we were very fortunate that the local Canterbury District Health Board which is the district health board to this entire area gave us an open check which we could have run away with and did a lot of interesting stuff but it was actually used. We, in fact, didn't need to worry about a bureaucracy or having to actually ask for permission to do something. We just got out there and did it and that was a huge godsend to all of us working in this area. One of the major findings was this if you want to communicate well with core communities following a disaster don't wait until something really bad happens. Get to know them now. Build a relationship with core communities based on mutual trust, respect and understanding. Next slide please. Contrary expectations around health. We found that many people most people from refugee backgrounds had this inbuilt reaction to flee and once they found out that there were recovery centers they actually managed to make their way to one in particular where we were able to deal with a lot of the issues all together. But one of the things that was very important here is that the storage of food and water amongst people coming into this country is not common. Whereas if you've brought up in New Zealand most of us do have food and water stored in a garage or somewhere that is easily accessible. But the assumption that migrants and refugee communities are more vulnerable in the time of earthquakes we found that not necessarily true. Because they're collective cultures they seem to coalesce around their own cultures and in doing so they were actually able to help themselves. Culturally learned responses I mean for example in China people are taught in an earthquake to get out of a building which is totally opposite to what you do in New Zealand. And we did have instances here of Chinese people and some Asian people actually running straight out and falling down sinkholes. Nobody lost their lives throughout but it was something that people actually we hadn't thought of before. But one of the really neat things that happened in many of these communities was young people taking on leadership roles just automatically because in many cases the young people's grasp of English was very positive. So that was a major plus that we hadn't actually planned on. So coming then to what we've been doing after the response phase one of the things that Kling has done is worked on putting together this best practice guidelines. And it's basically Kling primarily worked through and for communication with these groups. So coming then to what we're doing now in the next slide please. Some of the challenges that we've faced since this disaster response phase is ongoing mental health and wellbeing issues among migrant communities and also among the local communities as well. And as I mentioned earlier the ongoing earthquakes contributing to some of these difficulties. Since the earthquakes and demographics of Christchurch have changed immensely and we'll see a slide later with some of those statistics and with that's coming some racism. Interestingly despite the lessons that we feel we've learnt we're still having huge problems with funding and resourcing interpreting and translated resources despite having shown their importance. And we're also having issues with agencies not knowing what resources are already translated and not knowing what's out there and how to access them. It's just interesting and Ambassador Rieffall may be interested that other people in the Greater Christchurch site area who were born in Ireland 54.5% arrived after the earthquakes and Filipino population increased by 31% since the earthquakes and the Indian population by 37%. All of these people are coming in to help with cleanup, rebuild and our Filipino population in particular is growing very, very rapidly at the moment and that's bringing its own issues with it particularly around the way of communication. Next slide please. Nonetheless despite these challenges there've been some huge opportunities that have come out of the experiences we've had. The primary one being the collaboration between different groups and the support that the sector has got through this collaboration is incredibly important. Because of the lessons that we've learned and the experiences we've had and the collaboration that's been formed we feel like we're better prepared now because we have built those relationships that we feel are really important. There have been some improvements in terms of knowing about the importance of communication with cold communities. And so despite the challenges there definitely have been some improvements and I think we try and hang on to those as much as possible. Yes, the ongoing aftershocks actually are seen as a positive in some ways because they keep reminding people that we still have a long way to go to get out of this. Just a couple of other things that we've found to be very important and that's health literacy or literacy across the board and so far so much of the communication that came out initially was targeted at a reading age of 18 which is university reading age which actually goes over the heads of most people and they should actually be targeted at a reading age of 12 or 13. And this is very important when you're actually looking at translating material. We got involved very early with translating public health information because just as a small example our major river through Christchurch was heavily polluted with the coal eye and a host of other not particularly nice bacteria and this leads straight out into the ocean where we found people from non-English speaking backgrounds were fishing quite happily off the walls not knowing that the ocean around there was heavily contaminated. So that was actually corrected by putting up a sign at the end of the walls translated into several different languages. There's just simple things like that that we actually learned very quickly. We've got to be able to communicate with people in their own language and don't assume that people actually speak or read English. One of the areas with people that have English as a second language is that after a disaster people actually prefer to be able to communicate in their mother tongue because trying to actually figure things out in a second language doesn't actually work. Now there are three or four other slides at the end of this which we won't go through but for those people who do have access to the slides some of the other slide there which has access to a number of published research papers that have come out of the Canterbury experience and also a couple of copies of templates that we had done that were targeted specifically at agencies who get them involved in being prepared for a disaster for people from these non-English speaking backgrounds. So thank you for all your time and thank you for the invitation to be part of this. It's been lovely. Thanks to you both. Thanks for sharing your experience with the earthquakes and Christchurch which unfortunately are continuing and especially your lessons learned. There's some very good resonance between your messages not only with the two expert presentations but what we're learning overall in the MICA condition about the importance of preparedness measures and very explicitly reaching down into local communities and building trust and networks and communication bands in regular times so that those can be activated when a crisis hits and it's too late when you're in the emergency phase to think about trying to build those networks. Trust is a real issue with a culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Thank you for that acronym for us. I think it's very much those of the barriers that John was talking about that these are real barriers, these are real hurdles but they're possible to overcome with good planning and really reaching into local networks to build that trust, to build those relationships for better preparation. Those are key messages here. Let me just ask my colleagues whether we have time to take some questions from the floor, do we? Okay. Let me turn to Lorenzo perhaps to pose some of the questions that have come in by email and as he's getting ready to do that, I want to call your attention to an issue brief that is on the Migrants and Countries and Crisis website that specifically looks at this issue and trying to look at the interrelationship between migrants and disasters and the particular vulnerabilities that are faced, the fact that absolutely not one size fits all and the kinds of specific measures that can be taken with lots of examples. So we will show in a minute the slide with the website address that also includes a place where you can share your practices and this has a call going out to all of the participants in today's webinar. I think we do need platforms for sharing good practices. We need platforms where people can communicate and learn from one another, raise the awareness that then makes it possible to actually prepare better going forward. Lorenzo, go ahead, but here's up on the screen now, we'll leave this up is the website and specifically to share practice component where you can share your examples and with the opportunity to learn from one another. But Lorenzo, go ahead with some of the questions that have come in from our participants. We have had a few that came in before the webinar that are really, I think it could really complement what's being said by the various speakers. One of them is what incentives and benefits exist for host institutions and communities to adopt an inclusive approach towards planning for migrants in crisis. And the other side of it, so in light of the increasing levels of xenophobia, global level, how can one motivate migrants who may feel victims of exclusion to depart in disaster risk reduction efforts? In particular, how to reach out to invisible migrants? And there's a third one that I think is also really interesting. So what can volunteers, local emergency service groups and other individuals in the migrants host communities do in order to contribute to these efforts? So I don't know who can take these questions, but maybe it would be interesting to have, since we have representatives from the host government and the host communities and from the home countries, it would be interesting to have a mix of those. So maybe if the speakers want to reply to any of that, you can just show your hands on the screen for at least the ones or... Perhaps that'd be up for Ambassador Rabon, an opportunity, if you would like, to address. So the questions were, and thank you very much Lorenzo, or what incentives and benefits are there for host communities to adopt an inclusive approach, to include immigrant-immigrant communities in disaster risk reduction and disaster management, planning and mechanisms. And particularly, and secondly, the flip side of that is with rising xenophobia in so many areas, how to encourage and motivate migrants to actually participate in disaster risk reduction in the services that are available from governments at all levels. And then finally, what can volunteers do to help at all levels? So let me turn to Ambassador Rabon first and then perhaps to our expert speakers. Okay, thank you very much, very briefly. These are tips for host communities. I think there's one basic principle that's involved here. It is a social responsibility. It is a humane, I would say, responsibility for host communities to involve migrants. Make sure that they know what services are available to them. Make sure that they are part of their art planning and they are aware of how to take care of themselves because at the end, I think it's just one community. You cannot separate nationals or your citizens from migrant communities. You really have to do it. I can't think of any other reason why the host communities should involve migrant communities in this effort. How to reach out to invisible, especially invisible migrants where this is where really trust, it's a special effort. Everybody has to reach out. Governments of sending states, for example, the Philippines now in our case, our missions abroad are really mandated to reach out, to explain, to know where the Filipinas are. To host communities, they have to have agencies just like what they have presented to us in New Zealand, in California, at the national level, in FEMA. They have to reach out and explain and I think give them a message that when a disaster happens, everybody is protected. Everybody has access to assistance. There is no difference between citizens or permanent residents or migrants, even migrants in irregular situation. So there are many agencies, missions, voluntary groups, church groups, civil society groups can do this and that links me to the role of the volunteers. I think this is the most important thing. Let the migrant communities know that they are part of assistance, that they have access to services, that they can approach government agencies and civic societies, who can help them in times of crisis. It's this, I mean, you know, everybody has to set extra effort to reach out because these migrants will not come out in the open. As everybody has said, you know, in California, in New Zealand, in visible migrants, so to speak, they are afraid because of their situation. They, even if they want to be saved, you know, like the professor has said, some communities in California are being asked to, you know, to leave their residences, but they are afraid to be exposed in the open because they fear that they would be not repatriated to their countries or for charge, criminal charge. So we have to differentiate, really, between make sure that human services and all these systems are available to the perspective of the migration systems. Thank you very much, Ambassador Ribbon. Let me turn to our US co-chairs. Tom and Carol, would either of you like to take the floor and offer some thoughts about the three baskets of questions that were asked? Well, this is Tom. I haven't actually let Carol, I think, respond. It looks like it sounds like we're talking about the migrant communities responding to crisis. Carol, I don't know if you have something. Yes, I know that there are a number of efforts underway as one of the other speakers talked about locally where state and local governments are reaching out to members of migrant communities to work with them directly on preparedness, response, and recovery activities. In addition to that, every time there is a major disaster, such as the one that happened in New York City, Hurricane Sandy, FEMA does a very wide look at the demographics of the area so that we're sure we have native speakers to be able to go out and work in that community with the survivors so that we're sure they're getting the care and resources that they need. Thank you. Thank you very much, Carol. Let me ask our expert participants here. Our colleagues in question, would you like to offer any thoughts at this moment? Please go ahead. Just a couple of things. One of the, talking about volunteers, is particularly amongst our people from refugee backgrounds, many of them started forming themselves into groups and just got stuck into things like cleaning up liquefaction, none of them waited to be asked, and that was quite almost unusual because many people from these backgrounds don't come from countries where volunteers are well known or the concept is not well known, but actually doing it and others were actually feeding, cooking food for feeding other volunteers. As far as the xenophobia is concerned, we mentioned again with the Islamic communities, that may create efforts over the last six months or so to create platforms where people can actually visit mosques, our Afghani community late last year organized a function where over 500 people turned up, and that was extraordinary successful just to actually try and get on top of some of the awful things that have been portrayed in the media, if you like. There are some very positive things that have come out of this that probably wouldn't have happened if this had not occurred. And just to add in one comment to the incentives of benefits for governments, there has to be, I imagine, economic benefits. If you translate material into languages other than English, the cost of doing that is significantly less than the cost of dealing with people with bacterial disease, for example. I mean, that's just looking at it purely in terms of economics. Thank you both very much. Let me turn to Konode in California to see if there's anything you would like to add. I'll just add a quick comment about the xenophobia question that kind of builds upon the lack of awareness at the local level of, like in the shelters, for example, during the fires, although we have clear policies with the Red Cross and with emergency services and FEMA, that discrimination is not allowed, that it's obviously a policy that's on the books, but when you're in a situation where you have untrained workers and outreach volunteers, like for the Red Cross, for example, who don't know these policies, these things don't get enforced during disaster. So I think there's a larger need for training of people in the volunteer parts of disasters who are not necessarily familiar with the issues of discrimination in the communities that are especially vulnerable to these issues. So I think it's a training question is very important to talk about that. In California and Southern California, I mean, it's very tense here at the border for Mexican immigrants who are highly undocumented on a daily basis and even more pronounced, like I said before, during disaster. So the xenophobia thing is something that overshadows everything that with good intentions in many cases. And so things get quite ugly and in crisis situations here as well. Thank you very much for that. Please, of course, Ambassador Rigo, I remember because I heard some of our participants mention about reaction of relief workers like the Red Cross. I think the briefing or the reaching out does not involve only reaching out to the migrant communities. We have to reach out to local authorities. The briefing for members of the community that in times of crisis, they, ordinary citizens of a particular county or a particular state, they have to know that everybody should be protected. So that, you know, this raise this name and know, you know, like classification because we need all the members of the community to know that everybody has to be assisted. So not only migrant communities, we have to reach out, we have to do information campaign to everybody. Thank you very much, Ambassador Rigo. And I think that's a perfect note to close on. Let me just offer a three or four quick overview points, perhaps as takeaways. One, you have all stressed the importance of preparedness, of developing contingency plans, testing and updating them very regularly, that people move, people change and that level is such a need to build awareness and continually to test that. Secondly, you all mentioned the importance of networks and building trust to overcome fear and that fear is a major barrier when we're talking about migrant communities and particularly migrants in an irregular situation who of course need to be protected and assisted in the same way as nationals, but who may face very real barriers in doing so. So those networks of trust have to be built in regular times and messages have to go out consistently to say that they are eligible for and have access to emergency services when emergency arises regardless of status. Debunking those myths and debunking some of the stereotypes to reduce barriers is a key part of that and training is what's just highlighted is one of the key ways to do that, that it's not enough to have a central government policy which obviously is the first step and a critical step but people need to be trained in it all the way down the chain to the local level to have that be effective. Last two points is that collaboration was seen by all of you as absolutely essential between governments at the federal, the national, the local level with civil society, church, migrant organizations, with individual community leaders and really tapping them. And finally, my last point that you've all made is that of course migrants face additional vulnerabilities beyond citizens but they also can be tremendously empowered and empowering in helping others if we give them the means. So we should not simply assume vulnerability across the board but really see migrants and different communities as possibly empowering and helpful in disaster preparedness and response. I think those are very important, very positive messages for us to end our discussion on today and it's just today. I hope that this is not the end of the discussion but a beginning of one and a continuing one and let me just thank all of our presenters and speakers from governments, from partner UN agencies, from communities on the ground who are working with migrants, studying directly the experiences, learning lessons, putting into place practices to actually overcome the barriers and create better protection and assistance. Thank you all very much for joining us today. And as I said, please look at the making website. You can share your practices, take a look at the issue brief. We'd love to hear from you and keep this discussion going. Thank you very much for your time.