How the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure builds on the collaborative framework to build Disaster Resilient Infrastructure?

Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) is a new initiative spearheaded by India. It was announced by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Climate Action Summit in New York

Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure

• CDRI is the fruition of at least three years of discussions that India has had with more than 40 countries on the subject.
• The CDRI is envisaged as an international knowledge platform wherein the countries collaborate to make their existing and new infrastructure strong enough to withstand natural disasters.
• CDRI is an attempt to bring countries together to share and learn from the experiences of one another to protect their key infrastructure — highways, railways, power stations, communication lines, water channels, even housing — against disasters.

Need for an International Forum

• Even though disaster preparedness and infrastructure creation are largely national endeavours, modern infrastructure is also a web of networked systems, not always confined to national boundaries.
• There has been an increase in the number of trans-national and transcontinental highways and railways; transmission lines carry electricity across countries; assets on a river are shared.
• Damage to any one node could result in an cascading impact on the entire network, resulting in loss of livelihoods and disruption in economic activity in places far away from the site of a disaster.

How CDRI will fill the gaps?

• CDRI is neither meant to plan or execute infrastructure projects nor it is an agency to finance infrastructure projects in member countries.
• CDRI seeks to identify and promote best practices, provide access to capacity building, and work towards standardisation of designs, processes and regulations relating to infrastructure creation and management.
• CDRI attempts to identify and estimate the risks to and from large infrastructure in the event of different kinds of disasters in member countries.
• CDRI seeks to help member countries integrate disaster management policies in all their activities, set up institutions and regulatory provisions to ensure the creation of resilient infrastructure, and identify and use affordable finance and technology.

The CDRI also hopes not just countries but also organisations like UN bodies, financial institutions, and other groups working on disaster management as its members.