A national conference titled ‘COVID-19: Impact, Mitigation, Opportunities and Building Resilience’ was held on the 27th and 28th of January 2021. The conference was organized by the National Science Foundation, Sri Lanka. As part of project activities, two abstracts titled: 1) ‘Settling the Ripples: An Examination of Sri Lanka’s Approach to Addressing Cascading Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic’ and 2) ‘Towards Broadening the Scope of Disaster Risk Reduction:

An Exploration of How Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness is Currently Embedded within Existing Disaster Risk Reduction Planning in Sri Lanka’ were presented by Dr. Nishara Fernando and Ms. Naduni Jayasinghe respectively during the technical session themed ‘Resilience’. The session was co-chaired by Prof, Dilanthi Amaratunga, Director, Global Disaster Resilience Centre, University of Huddersfield, UK and Dr. Nishara Fernando, Senior Lecturer, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The abstract: ‘Settling the Ripples: An Examination of Sri Lanka’s Approach to Addressing Cascading Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic’ has been accepted to be published as a book chapter in the Conference Proceedings. Similarly, the abstract: ‘Towards Broadening the Scope of Disaster Risk Reduction: An Exploration of How Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness is Currently Embedded within Existing Disaster Risk Reduction Planning in Sri Lanka’ has been accepted to be published as a book chapter in the book volume: ‘Multi – Hazard Early Warning and Disaster Risk Reduction’ edited by Professor Dilanthi Amaratunga, Professor Richard Haigh and Dr. Nuwan Dias.