A new initiative
Since 2016, advocacy around World Tsunami Awareness Day (WTAD) has called on countries, international bodies and civil society to raise tsunami awareness and share innovative approaches to risk reduction.
In 2022 UNDRR launched a new WTAD initiative – the #GetToHighGround campaign – to activate citizens through participation in a drill, a run, or a walk along tsunami evacuation routes. These activities raise awareness about reducing tsunami risk while helping communities to prepare their own tsunami resilience. The events are an inclusive and engaging way to involve all people in raising tsunami risk awareness. Simulation exercises (SIMEX) as examples of preparedness activity. More on SIMEX.
The #GetToHighGround campaign calls for a culture of tsunami and coastal hazards awareness for all people at risk. The campaign also emphasizes the importance of understanding our risk and investing in action that both reduces risk and prepares us for future tsunami and coastal hazard risk reduction.
Tsunamis must be treated as multi-dimensional hazards. They threaten human life, but also disrupt livelihoods, industry, agriculture, gender equality, and critical services such as education and healthcare. These cascading risks can reverberate across sectors, geographies, and societies. Access to high quality, readily available information is key for supporting national mechanisms and local preparedness, and to enhancing awareness about early warning systems.
Participants
We invite partners including national, regional and local governments, international organizations, the UN System, non-governmental organizations, and all relevant stakeholders to contribute to building a culture of early warning and early action and to raise awareness on tsunami preparedness.
The concept is to engage citizens, raising awareness of tsunami and coastal risk, tailoring the action to the local context. The activity could be a organising a drill, fun run or walk of your tsunami and coastal risk evacuation route, or if you have an event, drill or activity, we warmly invite you to connect it to the #gettohighground. The #gettohighground campaign will run from November 2022 and continue across 2023. Citizens and communities are invited to participate to further enhance the preparedness of coastal communities for tsunamis.
In this activation toolkit you will find the following assets to support the organisation of your event and to join the #GetToHighGround initiative.
- Key facts on tsunami risk, customisable to your local context
- Customisable social cards to promote your event
- A downloadable social card template for participants to share, showing they took part
- A customisable poster to promote your event
- A customisable pamphlet with information on tsunami risk and a placeholder to insert your tsunami or coastal-risk evacuation route.
For print-ready design files for t-shirts, mugs, pens and other promotional products, please contact us.
Act now for global resilience:
Support early warnings and disaster preparedness
There's nothing natural about disasters.
In fact, contrary to popular perception, we are far from powerless in the face of earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones and pandemics. Such hazards may be inevitable, but their disastrous impacts are not: we can curb their devastating power by understanding their interrelated risks, setting up early warning systems and investing preemptively.
Every contribution makes a difference.
Early warning's impact
30% reduction
24 hours of early warning can cut the ensuing damage by 30 per cent
$3-16B in losses
Investing US$ 800 million in early warning systems in developing countries would avoid losses of $3-16 billion per year
1-in-3 lack warning
One-third of the world’s people, mainly in the least developed countries and small island developing states, are still not covered by early warning systems. In Africa, 60% of people lack coverage
8x mortality
Countries with limited early warning coverage have disaster mortality that is eight times higher than countries with substantial to comprehensive coverage