About the Forum

World Bosai Forum/ International Disaster Risk Conference 2019 in Sendai

The World Bosai Forum started with the wish that we would not want to increase the number of people suffering from disasters any more in the Tohoku area where we experienced the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

At the Third United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction held in Sendai in 2015, The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was adopted, which is a guideline for global disaster reduction efforts and people around the world discussed future disaster reduction.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction incorporates many ideas such as the importance of disaster risk management investment, better recovery, promoting the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is an important mission for Japan, since Japan has led the world in the field of disaster management. In addition, the activities of Japan and Tohoku in the process of recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake that occurred on March 11, 2011 has attracted strong interest from all over the world.

So far, international conferences on disaster prevention have been held around the United Nations to academic conferences etc., although there was no international venue where we can make discussions focused on concrete solutions to reduce disaster damage with sharing information.

For that reason, The World Bosai Forum proposes solutions from various points of view to enable disaster risk reduction in Japan and overseas, and aims to promote the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 while learning from each other and creating new values.

The 1st World Disaster Reduction Forum (2017) was led by Tohoku University and Sendai City, with a diverse group of stakeholders (United Nations, international organizations, governments, private sectors, media, NGOs, citizens, universities and research institutes). We have brought in concrete solutions to reduce disasters, sharing information, discussed, and promoted the creation of a field to generate new collaborations.

And, in the second World Bosai Forum (November 9-12, 2019) will address the Global Target E” in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 that aims to achieve significant increase in the number of countries by 2020 with holding national and regional disaster management strategies. We will share many detailed contents to seek for better reconstruction which contains structural (hard), non-structural (soft) and human-oriented (heart) measures. We will also share how to deal with climate change which is getting more serious in recent years, how to apply advanced technologies such as AI or IoT technology in disaster risk reduction.

Furthermore, in the Second World Bosai Forum, the main meeting consisting of about 50⁺ sessions and associated events such as "Sendai Bosai Future Forum" and "The 10th Earthquake Technology Expo TOHOKU" will be held simultaneously, make synergy effects are expected. And the World Bosai Forum also aims to be a platform as a birth-place of new ideas through interactions among multi-stakeholders.