Disaster-Preparedness for Memory Institutions in Asia and the Pacific (2022-2025)

The Asia-Pacific region has experienced numerous devastating events in the last twenty years, many of which have impacted cultural heritage and archive storage sites. They include significant earthquake destructions in Iran, Myanmar and Nepal, violent storms accompanied by floods in Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, as well as the great northeastern Japan earthquake in 2011 which paved the way to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR 2015).

Globally, according to the most recent UNESCO survey on documentary heritage preservation, 63 per cent of the surveyed institutions reported that they did not have a written disaster risk management (DRM) plan in place.  In South-East Asia, only 52 per cent of them used archiving and cataloguing software and 55 per cent mentioned DRM as a key issue (UNESCO 2022).

To address major gaps in the field of documentary heritage preservation, UNESCO with the support of Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) launched a project focused on policy development and capacity-building in the archive and heritage sector. Today, it continues to consolidate its activities, notably in connection to disaster awareness-raising and the creation of DRM learning tools that are designed to enhance the knowledge and skills of archivists, librarians, museum professionals, conservators, and professionals involved in disaster preparedness, emergency response, and recovery of heritage collections.

Following two years of consultations and international cooperation efforts, a training toolkit on DRM/DRR has been published by UNESCO in September 2024 and will serve as a manual during training workshops in Asia-Pacific.