Afghanistan's capacity to mitigate the impact of natural disasters is very low in most cases and the country is not capable of addressing disaster risks, United Nations special representative for disaster risk deduction said in Kabul.
However, with a new strategy from the UN and with cooperation from the Afghan government, the representative suggested it's time to put greater effort into improving the country's ability to deal with natural disasters.
"Afghanistan has suffered from many decades of war and instability, but Afghanistan is also suffering from floods, droughts, earthquakes. And the more people that live here the higher these risks will become as well," Margareta Wahlström, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction told TOLOnews Tuesday.
"I think, the country deserves and merits to have strong constitution that can really work at local level, and respond to daily disasters."
Wahlstrom has recently met with senior Afghan officials, vice president Karim Khalili, the national disaster management council, and also a number of development partners on the matter.
"There are many questions, of course, around what are the most important things for a national disaster management authority. How can they obtain and strengthen the capacity, what is the time frame, what is the capacity of partners to support them, but also what other capacities are there in Afghanistan," Wahlström said.
"We have organisations like the Red Crescent which is strong, some of the ministries have a lot of capacity."
Commenting on the rapidly increasing population of Afghanistan, the UN disaster risk reduction representative suggested that it is important for the country's future to have a well-built capability at both the provincial level and district level to respond to such disasters at a local level.
"We will finalise our conversation, and again suggest a programme of cooperation with ANDMA [Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority] and other partners for how to build the capacity together in a coordinated manner so that they can really see some progress in the next couple of years. So, that's what we hope to achieve now," she said.