Japan-Mozambique Foreign Ministers' meeting and working dinner in Tokyo
Picture: Magazine CRV
The City of Beira celebrated its 112th anniversary on Tuesday (August 20) still bearing the scars left by Cyclone Idai. “The reconstruction process represents an opportunity to adopt better planning and construction norms and ensure greater resilience and adaptation to climate change,” Mayor Daviz Simango said at an event celebrating the “political emancipation” of the provincial capital of Sofala.
“Celebrating political emancipation, and the anniversary of our Beira, brings me to an understanding of the force that unifies our people. I believe we have here a mission: to build in the present opportunities for the future, and to strive every day to leave a legacy of social and economic development, as well as dignity for future generations,” Simango said in a speech at the festively decorated Praça do Município.
In the words of the mayor of Mozambique’s second city, and perhaps one of the first to be sacrificed to climate change: “Cyclone Idai was a tough test for our city and for each of us, establishing, with its unprecedented intensity, new standards in terms of risk and vulnerability.”
“The reconstruction process represents an opportunity to adopt better planning and construction norms and ensure greater resilience and adaptation to climate change in Beira. In this process, we need to raise awareness of a culture of overcoming and adapting at all levels, living with natural hazards in a safe and sustainable way,” Simango said, taking advantage of the event to recall that the municipality needed money to carry out the Master Plan is approved long before the recent natural disaster by 2035.
Built on marshy ground at the confluence of the Púnguè and Búzi rivers, and below sea level, the settlement was founded in 1887 and initially named Chiveve, after a local river, but renamed in honour of the Prince of Beira, D. Luís Filipe, who in 1907 was the first member of the Portuguese royal family to visit Mozambique. D. Luís Filipe was the bearer of the royal decree granting Beira the status of a City which, in 2017, housed 592,090 inhabitants.
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