99 students from 14 countries spent three days in Iwate learning how to outlive a tsunami

Iwate Prefecture, on Japan's Pacific coast, knows tsunamis the way few places do — and from 20 to 22 October it hosted 99 high-school students from 14 countries for the World Tsunami Awareness Day summit, co-hosted with the UN's UNITAR Hiroshima office and Japan's foreign ministry. The students studied how Japan reduces disaster risk, then workshopped three themes: leaving no one behind, building resilience before disaster strikes, and passing lessons on. Their conclusions became a Summit Declaration. Parliamentary Vice-Minister Ikuna Akiko urged them to treat preparedness as both 'hard' and 'soft' measures — sea walls, yes, but also memory, drills and bonds, the kizuna, between people. The students now carry those lessons home to Brunei, Fiji, Vietnam, the United States and nine other countries — a generation of preparedness, travelling by teenager.

SDG 4 · Quality education — Mechanism: institutional program