In This Issue
                          IAEM's Asia-Oceania Resilience Conference Program Released
                          APEC Task Force on Emergency Preparedness                          
                          2010 Emergency Management Training Calendar

                          It's cheaper to prepare than to recover
                          Outsource Your BCP Work in Asia

IAEM Asia has announced sixteen (16) engaging, educational and entertaining presentations on resilience by practicing professionals in Asia and Oceania for its AOR conference, 5-6 October 2010 in Singapore.  AOR brings together, for the first time in Asia, professionals from emergency management, business continuity, crisis management, security, disaster management and disaster relief. From advice on growing perennial grass vetiver for flood mitigation, and business continuity for small & medium-sized businesses, to real emergency case studies from both Cathay Pacific and Pakistan International Airlines, you won't find a better conference on disasters, emergencies, risks and business continuity this year.  Really, where else will you meet a sponsor selling body bags and cadaver tracking software?

The two-day conference is just SGD 630 (USD 450) for IAEM members and only SGD 840 (USD 600) for non-IAEM members. Register for the Asia-Oceania Resilience conference here. Hint: join IAEM Asia for USD 80.00,  then register for the AOR conference at the IAEM member rate; it's less expensive. Pay by credit card (in USD only), wire transfer, PayPal or cheque.

Nathaniel Forbes will be speaking at the Asia Pacific Economic Council (APEC) Task Force on Emergency Preparedness about issues for Public Private Partnerships & Disaster Resilience in Asia-Pacific on Friday, 27 August in Bangkok, Thailand. His presentation tells the story of a young mother in Thailand after the 2004 tsunami, to illustrate the importance of multi-party partnership. His message is simple: Asia must have meetings, conferences and web sites for public- and private-sector resilience professionals to learn from each other. (That's exactly the purpose of IAEM's Resilience conference, in fact.) Only through cooperation can we protect citizens, companies and communities. Here are APEC's Principles on Disaster Response & Cooperation (26 points, 3 pages).

We've scheduled these emergency management courses for the second half of 2010, suitable for public information officers (PIO's), corporate communications staff, human resource professionals and business continuity managers. Check our Training page for additional courses.

Note: our Crisis Communications training is *not* media training for company spokesmen. If you're interested in media training, please let Chris Tan know so we can send you the announcement for that course in 2011.

What kind of training do your employees need? Crisis management, emergency management, risk management, business continuity management? Kidnap & ransom? Executive security? Something else? Send a suggestion or an inquiry by email to Chris Tan. If your suggestion turns into a course, we will offer you a free place in it.

Instructors for our Crisis Communication course are Nathaniel Forbes, MBCI CBCP, Mr. Koh Su Haw and Suzanne Anderson, MSW. In the morning session, participants will create their own crisis web sites online using Wordpress software and templates provided by the instructors; participants can develop the web sites further after the course.  In the afternoon session, participants learn basic group and individual intervention and para-counseling skills. Handouts include take-away checklists for psychological first-aiders.

If you get email alerts (like this one from the February 2010 Chile earthquake) from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) after a tsunami warning, you see "gauge locations" and the amplitude (height) of the water above its normal level at those locations. The gauges are the United States' National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Deep-ocean Assessment & Reporting of Tsunami (DARTÒ) buoys. If you were trying to guess how soon a tsunami might reach you, or which way it were headed, you'd want to see where those gauges were on a map. Here's the National Data Buoy Center's map of the DART buoys, mostly in the Pacific Ocean. Click on any red diamond to see where it is; there's a photo of each one and a Google Maps image. Data is normally recorded every fifteen (15) minutes, but as often as every minute after an alert.

Nathaniel will be the keynote speaker at the second annual World Conference on Disaster Management  Sydney (Australia) on October 11-12, 2010. Nat will be reprising his WCDM Toronto keynote presentation, "Water & Disasters: The Impact of Thirst", rated the top presentation by WCDM Toronto attendees. (He'll also be delivering it at the IAEM AOR conference in Singapore, too.) WCDM Sydney is small and intimate, about 125 people last year; expect more people this year. Last year's attendees genuinely raved about the networking opportunities and the presentations.  See the 2010 program and register for WCDM Sydney.  Early registration ends 31 July 2010. There is a special discount for IAEM members; use discount code IAEM2 when you register.

From the Ounce of Prevention Department comes this study, Insuring against earthquakes: simulating the cost-effectiveness of disaster preparedness (15 pages), by Dutch researchers Dr. Thomas de Hoop and Professor Ruerd Ruben. It confirms what you've always suspected:  money spent before a disaster does more good than money spent afterward. The report says NGO's should encourage recipients to obtain risk insurance, for example, because it could reduce "consumption loss" (reduced economic activity) after a disaster. It seems so logical. Why hasn't it already been adopted? Because of "perverse incentives" that encourage people to assume that external help will come after a disaster, even if they don't do anything to mitigate their risk.