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"Knowledge Save Lives" UNESCO International Day for Disaster Reduction Featured

"Knowledge Save Lives" UNESCO International Day for Disaster Reduction

Message from Ms Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO

“Knowledge  saves lives”

UNESCO, 13 October 2015

Knowledge saves lives. This day is an opportunity to focus on the vital importance of traditional indigenous and local knowledge in disaster risk reduction with respect to natural hazards.

The contribution of indigenous and local knowledge to resilience among vulnerable populations  was highlighted when the tsunami occurred in the Indian Ocean in
2004.  The  third  United  Nations  World  Conference  on Disaster  Risk Reduction (14-18 March 2015) in Sendai, Japan, particularly emphasized the need to make this knowledge  better  known for the benefit of all. 

The Sendai Framework thus campaigns for greater cooperation between governments, local authorities, communities  and  indigenous  peoples  in the formulation  and  implementation  of policies and standards for natural disaster prevention.

UNESCO is firmly engaged in this process, through its scientific, educational and cultural expertise. UNESCO is committed to the widest possible dissemination of indigenous  knowledge  to  meet  the  challenges  of  climate  change  and  natural hazards, especially in remote areas such as small islands, high altitude zones and the humid tropics.

UNESCO has launched an initiative in the Philippines, Timor- Leste and Indonesia to record local knowledge that helps to predict, mitigate and adapt to storms, cyclones and the effects of climate change. It all demonstrates the profound knowledge and mastery of the environment by the peoples who live there, which we must urgently include in natural disaster management policies.

On  the  island  of  Ambae,  in  Vanuatu,  UNESCO   has  helped  to  develop   a participatory approach so as to integrate traditional and scientific knowledge in the management of volcanic hazards. On the occasion of this International Day, we are inviting Vanuatu schoolchildren recently affected by Tropical Cyclone Pam to write essays, poems and stories that depict the use of traditional and local knowledge. This traditional and indigenous knowledge also helps to protect the cultural heritage against natural hazards and UNESCO is committed to making the best use of it.

Effective and sustainable disaster risk prevention requires the combination of indigenous practices and knowledge with scientific expertise. We cannot afford to ignore the knowledge available to us; instead, we must expand on and integrate knowledge and expertise wherever they may be found.  

I invite all of our partners and governments to promote this global vision: it is the key to building societies that are all the more resilient when they are inclusive.

Irina Bokova

2 comments

  • Hufanga (Okusitino Mahina)
    Hufanga (Okusitino Mahina) Wednesday, 14 October 2015 03:34 Comment Link

    Just to add to my commentaries on the temporal-spatial, formal-substantial and functional movement of the human intellect from vale (ignorance) to 'ilo (knowledge) to poto (skills). as duly theorised in the Tongan practice of ako (education) that such 'ilo (knowledge) and poto (skills) are historically composed or constituted in fonua (culture) as a spectacle and dialectically communicated or transmitted in tala / lea (language) as a vehicle, both of which are inseparable entities in reality, as in nature, mind and society.

    While it is immensely important to stress that "knowledge and skills save lives," it is also strictly significant to highlight the very fact that such 'ilo (knowledge) and poto (skills) also mean 'ilo (knowledge) of and poto (skill) in both fonua (culture) and tala / lea (language) as devices for their composition or constitution and communication or transmission in ta (time) and va (space).

    Whereas such 'traditional,' 'indigenous' Tongan-based 'ilo and poto are largely imprinted in the human memories of people and orally / verbally communicated in ta and va, 'scientific,' Western-led knowledge and skills are strictly printed / written in books in libraries and textually transmitted over time and space.

    Mind you both the spoken and the written are merely two types of language, where one is spoken by the mouth and the other written by the hands, made up of both sound and written symbols respectively, which function as means of human communication, thereby pointing to language as a "symbolic pointer" to things out there in reality, as in nature, mind and society.

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  • Hufanga (Okusitino Mahina)
    Hufanga (Okusitino Mahina) Wednesday, 14 October 2015 02:39 Comment Link

    The clear and logically coherent push by UNESCO for a time-space, form-content and functional integration (that is, intersection or connection and separation) of both forms of knowledge, namely, traditional and scientific, in the management of natural disasters is surely a move in the right direction.

    But, the ideologically-led, subjectively-driven rationalistic divide between traditional and scientific knowledge, where the former is taken to be of a lower status than the latter (or, for that matter, the latter as having a higher status over the former), when they are, in fact, merely different forms of knowledge about the-one-and-only-level-of-reality, must be done away with before there is hope for this temporal-formal, spatial-substantial and functional integration / intersection to take place in the process, both theoretically and practically.

    In the final analysis, both forms of knowledge are subject to more or less the same test, beginning with experimentation and ending with verification, via the good and age-old theoretical and practical process of trial-and-error. The use of the laboratory in the production of scientific knowledge basically involves a contraction of both time and space as opposed to leaving it to human experience,, where knowledge (and skills deriving from knowledge) is empirically refined over an elongation of time-space.

    In Tongan thought and praxis, however, education engages a time-space, form-content and functional transformation of the human mind (and thinking) from ignorance to knowledge to skills, that is, from the epistemic or intellectual to the pragmatic or technical, in that logical but circular and dialectical order of precedence.

    For example, it is one thing to theoretically know that the entities of wind and sound are two different forms of energy and it is quite another to have the skills of beating empty tins, drums, bells and shouting out loud as way of activating sound energy as means of weakening tornadoes, twisters or whirlwinds as a form of energy of motion.

    Should UNESCO, then, revise its position by now saying: "Knowledge and skills save lives," which is more total and complete an approach and that by saying: "Knowledge saves lives" is quite simply an approach that is partial and incomplete, both theoretically and practically.

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