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298Towards safer and more secure citiesInformal education… offers a keyopportunity forempowering thoseat risk…Deliberative processes can be used either for instrumentalends or for genuine citizen empowerment. They canopen political space for debate about wider questions ofethics, values and their links with issues of justice, moralityand rights in development or risk management decisionmaking.Techniques used include citizens’ juries, citizens’panels, committees, consensus conferences, scenarioworkshops, deliberative polling, focus groups, multi-criteriamapping, public meetings, rapid and participatory urbanappraisal, and visioning exercises.Recent examples of deliberative planning feeding intodecision-making for risk governance have included thesetting of air quality standards and regulation in Santiago(Chile); citizen involvement in the location of a hazardouswaste facility in Alberta (Canada); urban environmentalassessment in Greenpoint, New York (US); and, a citizens’panel to feed into a decision on where to locate a wastedisposal site in Canton Aargau (Switzerland). 72 All of theseactivities provide scope for local communities to be involvedin planning decisions that shape their exposure to humanmadehazard and potential disaster.Deliberative techniques can take time and this is apotential source of exclusion for those who are poor orhave little time to spare. Care needs to be taken to ensurethat women burdened with domestic, child caring andother tasks can still engage in the process. Guidelines fordeliberative and inclusive processes have been proposed bythe UK-based Institute of Public Policy Research. 73 Despitethe wide application of deliberative methods, there hasbeen little systematic analysis of the interaction of thesemethods with the wider policy process that they claim toinfluence. 74Box 12.18 World Disaster Reduction Campaign: DisasterRisk Reduction Begins at SchoolFaced with the huge challenge of responding to urban disaster risk, it is difficult to know whereto start. One leading priority should be to make public infrastructure safe for those who use ittoday and as a legacy for the future. Protecting schools adds security and can build humanresources when undertaken as part of an integrated programme of education and skill developmentin addition to structural safety.The need for risk reduction initiatives for schools is clear. In 2006, 160 schools weredestroyed during an earthquake in Iran, and a mudslide on Leyte Island in the Philippinescovered a single school but killed more than 200 children. In 2005, the South Asian earthquakeled to over 16,000 children being killed when schools collapsed.The 2006–2007 World Disaster Reduction Campaign: Disaster Risk Reduction Beginsat School is led by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) inpartnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), ActionAid International and theInternational Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). It seeks to promotedisaster reduction education in school curricula, and to improve school safety by encouragingthe application of construction standards that can withstand any kind of natural hazard.The campaign was launched in June 2006 and during this year brought attention toschool safety through press briefings and workshops with journalists, academics and policymakers.Activities have taken place in Kathmandu (Nepal), Nairobi (Kenya), Panama City(Panama), Bali (Indonesia), Geneva (Switzerland), Paris (France) and Wuppertal (Germany).Source: ISDR, www.unisdr.org/eng/public_aware/world_camp/2006-2007/wdrc-2006-2007.htmEducation for awareness-raising andself-relianceEducation provides a key resource to make risk reductionstrategies more inclusive. A little over half of the countriesreporting to the United Nations World Conference onDisaster Reduction in 2005 stated that their educationsystems included some form of disaster-related teaching.Mexico, Romania and New Zealand mandate, by law, theteaching of disaster-related subjects in their schools.A very recent review of the potential of educationsystems to raise awareness and skills for disaster risk reductionreports that many school curricula already focus onhazards through earth science, and also practise preparednessand drills; but few schools integrate the two and fewdevelop their own local curriculum to reflect local riskcontexts. 75 Greater still is the unmet potential for schools toconnect learning with practice in the local community.School curricula vary greatly. Some provide excellenttraining in earth and climate science, but do not focus onlocally experienced hazards. In other cases, they focus exclusivelyon one recent disaster. On the tsunami-affected coastof Thailand, new curricula focus exclusively on tsunami,despite more common hazards being coastal storms, floodsand forest fire.In Cuba, disaster preparedness, prevention andresponse are part of all school curricula. This is supported bythe Cuban Red Cross, which provides teaching material, andis reinforced by training courses and disaster drills forparents in the workplace, as well as by radio and televisionbroadcasts. The impacts of such holistic education can beseen, in part, in Cuba’s exceptional record in protectinghuman life in recent hurricanes. 76 In Ecuador, Civil Defenceis involved in training on appropriate actions to be taken byteachers and students in case of emergency for both earthquakesand volcanic eruption. These programmes were putto the test during recent active periods of Pichincha andReventador volcanoes.In New Delhi (India), 500 schools have developedschool disaster plans as a result of the work of schoolcommittees composed of the zone education officer, theprincipal, teachers, parents, the head boy and the head girl.Mock drills are held in the selected schools. The childrenalso learn life-saving skills. 77Informal education also offers a key opportunity forempowering those at risk, not only children, but adults too.Informal education can be promoted alongside formalservices, where these exist, to target vulnerable groups whomay be excluded from formal education through poverty orsocial inequality. Two successful pathways are to developcommunity and popular media programmes. Communitydelivery works well where programmes are built onto existingcommunity organizations and networks. The advantageof this approach is that people can learn from experience andthe example of others. Using the popular media can reachmore people and be cost effective in these terms, but hasless lasting impressions compared to community-deliveredprogrammes of education. Opportunities for combiningpopular media with local activities offer perhaps the greatestscope for informal education to reduce risk.