Prof. Dina D'Ayala and Dr. Rafael Fernández attended the Expert Dialogue on Enhancing School Safety

On April 8 and 9, Prof. Dina D'Ayala and Dr. Rafael Fernández represented the UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Engineering at the event "Enhancing School Safety: Expert Regional Dialogue on Retrofitting and Disaster Risk Reduction Strategies". This expert dialogue was organised by UNESCO through its Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe as part of the Japanese Funds-in-Trust project titled “UNESCO's immediate recovery response to the earthquakes in February 2023”. Aimed at strengthening the structural integrity of school buildings in Türkiye’s earthquake-affected areas, the initiative focuses on enhancing resilience through targeted retrofitting efforts, policy reforms, and capacity-building programs. The meeting built on major disaster risk reduction initiatives in South-East Europe and beyond, where school safety assessments, retrofitting programmes, and policy reforms have significantly improved earthquake preparedness.
The main objective of the event was to enhance knowledge exchange on policy best practices and evidence-based engineering solutions to strengthen earthquake preparedness and school resilience. Specifically, the UNESCO Chair in DRR&RE contributed to the session "Structural Safety & Retrofitting Schools – Exploring engineering innovations and cost-effective retrofitting solutions to enhance the resilience of existing school buildings with a presentation entitled: “School infrastructure resilience at scale: The GLOSI approach and its applications” delivered by Prof D’Ayala, highlighting retrofitting methodologies that allow upgrading large school portfolios, such as is the need in Turkey. Dr Rafael Fernandez participated in the follow-up lively debate on the topic of “Recommendations for safer schools”.
The event brought together project partners, national authorities, international organisations, representatives from UNESCO Category II centres, UNESCO Chairs, National Commissions for UNESCO, and JICA experts in school safety and disaster risk reduction. 

Below are some pictures of the event: