Upwards of 250 million people around the world are affected by disasters every year. Such an overwhelming figure undoubtedly stems from our present-day increased awareness, as global news leaps the obstacles and frontiers that once kept it local. However, despite the daunting scale of the statistic, there is hope, for with this mass-media knowledge of scale and heart-rending social detail comes both the common urge to help fellow humans in distress and, in the case of the United Nations (UNISDR), the incentive to develop strategies to reduce the effects of disasters.