German Committee for Disaster Reduction (Deutsches Komitee Katastrophenvorsorge e.V., DKKV)
The DKKV
... is
- the national platform for disaster prevention in Germany.
- intermediary to international organisations and initiatives active in the field of disaster prevention.
- a competence centre for all questions of national and international disaster risk management.
.... supports
- interdisciplinary research approaches to disaster risk management in other specialist sectors as well as in politics and business.
- disseminating the knowledge of disaster preparedness at all levels of education.
... recommends
- the implementation of existing findings on disaster risk management in politics, business and administration.
- the further development of interdisciplinary and transnational cooperation in operational disaster risk management.
- the development of media strategies to promote and strengthen prevention awareness in society.
Strategy 2020+

Learn more about the 2020+ strategy. The strategy paper serves as a trend-setting roadmap for DKKV's work in the coming years.
The working fields of the DKKV
Network: DKKV maintains a strong network with various players from the operational and scientific fields of disaster prevention and management. The network provides access to up-to-date information on calls for proposals, events, publications and other developments in disaster prevention. Furthermore, DKKV organises workshops, conferences and summer schools to strengthen the exchange and synergies within the expert public.
Consulting: With the help of the network's diverse expertise, the scientific project and consulting services are offered as a neutral platform. DKKV produces reports, policy briefs, lessons learned studies and other scientific publications for disasters in Germany and abroad, such as those on heavy rainfall in Germany or the 2013 floods.
Knowledge transfer: Another of DKKV's tasks is to address civil society and the general public, as well as to pool and communicate specialist knowledge in a comprehensible way and raise awareness of disasters. We provide information on current events via our website and our Twitter channel. In addition, interested parties can find further information and recommendations for action on various extreme weather conditions and natural hazards on the topic pages of the DKKV website.
DKKV as research partner
Research plays an important role in the further development of disaster prevention strategies and in the entire field of civil protection. The broad networking is a unique selling point of DKKV, which makes it particularly well suited as a partner in research projects in the field of disaster prevention and civil protection. As a network, DKKV has a particular opportunity to contribute a wide range of expertise from various operational and scientific areas of disaster prevention to research projects and to network with each other. DKKV's aim here is to establish a link between science, practice and politics and to support research projects in line with requirements. In particular, it focuses on the coordination of research activities, the design of communication within and beyond the research consortium, and the synthesis of research results and their dissemination in line with needs and target groups.
- Coordination
DKKV coordinates activities in research projects and schemes and, thanks to the broad expertise of its network, can efficiently guide research work, link up with existing work to generate synergies and avoid duplication of research.
- Communication
In research projects, DKKV can manage communication between individual partners and ensure the targeted dissemination of research results to national and international recipients.
- Synthesis
Thanks to its extensive networking of different expertise, DKKV is particularly well suited to synthesising existing research results and procedures and to preparing them in line with requirements.
Constitution
General and further information on the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) can be found in the following document.
Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction
In March 2015, the Third United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction was held in Sendai, Japan. There, the "Sendai Framework for Disaster Reduction" was adopted, which provides tools for proactive risk management and aims to limit the impact of natural disasters.
While the previous "Hyogo Framework for Action" focused primarily on disaster reduction, the new framework now goes one step further and provides states, NGOs, and all other actors in disaster reduction with a tool for predictive risk management. With Sendai, the conditions are now in place to significantly limit the impact of disasters until 2030. Since its adoption, the action-oriented objectives of the framework have also been decisive for DKKV's work.
Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 - 2030_english