Barcelona, 21 May 2014: The High Level Committee of Programming’s Senior Management Group meeting on the UN Plan of Action for Disaster Risk Reduction closed its 6th Meeting yesterday at the UN-Habitat City Resilience Profiling Office in Barcelona.

 Twenty-four people representing 14 Agencies, Funds and Programmes of the UN, including the World Bank and the International Organisation for Migration, attended the two-day event, convened and Chaired by the UN’s office for disaster risk reduction, UNISDR’s Director, Elizabeth Longworth.

 One of the key outcomes of this meeting was consensus among the agencies represented, that the members of the Senior Manager’s Group should align their disaster related work in urban areas with the principles outlined in the Medellin Collaboration on Urban Resilience.

 The collaboration, announced during WUF 7, commits nine key institutions already working to support local governments’ aims to build resilience, to a set of eight principles designed to harmonize, align and streamline access by local authorities to resources appropriate to their needs, to make their cities safer and more resilient to hazards, shocks, and crises.