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orld leaders are gathering in the northern Japanese city of Sendai to attend the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR), in which they will collectively establish new international guidelines for disaster risk reduction to replace the 10-year-old Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA).

Kicked off on Saturday morning, the five-day conference is organized by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), which has been assigned by the UN to facilitate the development of a post 2015 framework on disaster risk reduction.

The meeting will review what lessons have been learned since the last conference, which came months after a quarter of a million people died in the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Speaking in a press briefing on Friday, UNISDR communications and outreach chief Denis McClean said the conference would be attended by 20 heads of state or government, over 100 ministers and minister-level officials and thousands of delegations representing up to 190 countries.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Japan'€™s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, will attend the opening ceremony on Saturday morning.

The HFA, introduced in 2005, not long after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, outlines five priorities for action, and offers guiding principles and practical means for achieving disaster resilience. Some 168 countries agreed to sign the 10-year plan to help build the resilience of nations and communities against disasters, which caused the world an average of US$300 billion in economic losses annually.

McClean said the latest draft made by the preparatory committee included new issues, such as the acknowledgement of the business sector'€™s role in disaster risk reduction and the mitigation of health-related disasters.

'€œWhat this new agreement seeks to do is help governments, local government and the private sector and stakeholders to reduce and avoid the losses happening in the first place,'€ he said.

'€œ[It is important] to train volunteers and people working at the community level with more than just typical and classical actions to disaster management, such as early evacuation, but also training them on basic surveillance techniques on how to spot the early signs of maybe a flu epidemic, Ebola or other communicable diseases in the community,'€ he said.

Indonesia, which is known as one of the world'€™s disaster-prone countries, also sent a delegation consisting of dozens of people representing several ministries and NGOs. The delegation is led by National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) head Syamsul Maarif.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla is also expected to attend the conference and serve as speaker for one of the conference'€™s sessions.

Indonesian delegation member Suryama M Sastra, the founder of the Community Caring Justice Post (PKPU), one of the country'€™s largest charity foundations, said he was expecting to learn from the conference about how the government and private parties could harmonize efforts to promote disaster risk reduction and maintain development sustainability.

'€œNo matter how good a country'€™s [disaster risk reduction] strategy is, it must prevail when it comes to implementation,'€ he said.