Regional Office for Arab States
Overview
The UNDRR Regional Office for Arab States (ROAS) was established in 2007 to support Arab States and communities build their resilience to disasters. ROAS partners for disaster risk reduction (DRR) with key regional intergovernmental organizations including the League of Arab States and its technical regional organizations.
ROAS promotes linkages and coordination at regional level with civil society networks, expert technical groups, the media and UN and international organizations to build awareness and knowledge of contextual risks and to collaborate around risk reduction activities.
UNDRR’s regional efforts help to improve the relevance and understanding of DRR in the region and promote the integration of risk reduction in regional and national policies and plans such as on climate change adaptation, sustainable development, urban development and city planning.
UNDRR Regional Office for Arab States
14 Road 280, Off Laselky Street, Corner of Mashreq Bank
New Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
Email: undrr-arabstates@un.org
Phone: +2 (02) 25229166
Fax: +2 (02) 25164918
Countries
Algeria 
Bahrain 
Comoros 
Djibouti 
Egypt 
Iraq 
Jordan 
Kuwait 
Lebanon 
Libya 
Mauritania 
Morocco 
Oman 
Qatar 
Saudi Arabia 
Somalia 
Sudan 
Syrian Arab Republic 
Tunisia 
United Arab Emirates 
Yemen
News and events
May 2022
September 2022
Publications
Regional platform
Activities
Following the Sendai Framework guidance, UNDRR Regional office for Arab States has organized several coordination meetings to accelerate the implementation of the Sendai Framework in the region. The most recent declaration, the Tunis Declaration in 2018, which was adopted along with several stakeholder groups’ voluntary action statements, came out as the result of a series of successful coordination meetings. The aim of the bi-annual Arab Partnership for DRR meetings since 2017 has been to create a forum for technical and operational deliberation on the progress, challenges and gaps in the implementation of the Sendai Framework in the region. These periodic discussions on the implementation challenges, gaps and solutions intend to inform the deliberations of the Arab Regional Platform conferences.
The last partnership meeting, held in December 2019 in Cairo, Egypt, took stock of progress, challenges and opportunities in the implementation of the Sendai Framework in the Arab Region, specifically focusing on Target E of the Sendai Framework; and come up with agreed upon actions to accelerate progress. Participants also discussed identifying and scaling up innovative solutions towards climate risk management and integration of DRR and Climate Change in the SDGs.
The "Making Cities Resilient" campaign addresses issues of local governance and urban risk while drawing upon previous UNDRR Campaigns on safer schools and hospitals, as well as on the sustainable urbanization principles developed in the UN-Habitat World Urban Campaign 2009-2013. UNDRR’s regional office works closely with National governments, local government associations, international, regional and civil society organizations, donors, the private sector, academia and professional associations as well as every citizen as they all need to be engaged in reducing their risk to disasters.
The Regional Assessment Report is a starting point to address rapidly increasing disasters exposure in the Arab region towards addressing the challenges of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation within a broad framework of sustainable development and poverty reduction. The regional assessment report highlights the risk scenario, drivers of risk and its trends and how to adopt approaches based on broad participation and partnerships and to address underlying drivers of risk, such as declining ecosystems, vulnerable rural livelihoods and badly planned and managed urban development. The RAR also highlights the importance of investing in disaster risk reduction and the need to take risk informed decisions for sustainable development. RAR helps the national governments civil society and other stakeholders through strategic policy advice on how to address these challenges.
The Sendai Framework Monitor (SFM) functions as a management tool to help countries develop disaster risk reduction strategies, make risk-informed policy decisions and contribute to Target E of the Sendai Framework related to development of actionable national and local disaster risk reduction strategies by 2020. As of March 1, 2018, Member States can report against a set of 38 indicators, recommended by an Open-ended Intergovernmental Expert Working Group (OIEWG), to track progress in implementing the seven global targets of Sendai Framework as well as its related dimensions reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals 1, (11) and (13).
DesInventar Sendai implements all the Indicators and data required for the Monitoring of Targets (A) to (D) of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which correspond to parallel Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's) indicators from Goals 1, 11 and 13. Among many other new features, it also allows for the definition and use of Sendai Framework metadata to describe several indicators and allow a finer desegregation of data.