Welcome to the United Nations
Introduction
1. The seventh session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction took place from 25 to 27 May 2022 in Bali, Indonesia. It was co-chaired by H.E. Prof. Muhadjir Effendy, Coordinating Minister for Human Development and Cultural Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia, and Ms. Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction. Organized in a hybrid format, the Global Platform had over 4000 participants from a total of 185 countries. Progress towards gender parity and accessibility was evident throughout the platform. Half of the panellists and 40 percent of participants were women. Over 200 persons with disability actively engaged in panels and in discussion, doubling the number since the 2019 Global Platform.
2. The Global Platform was organized at a time when the world is recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, while facing the growing impacts of the climate emergency. This has been compounded by conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, which has disrupted global supply chains, led to inflation, and threatened food security, further deepening vulnerabilities of people living in the most disaster-prone parts of the world.
3. The theme of the Global Platform, “From Risk to Resilience: Towards Sustainable Development for All in a COVID-19 Transformed World”, offered lessons from the pandemic and pathways to address the climate emergency. The Global Platform underscored urgent actions necessary to accelerate efforts to bring the world on track to achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
4. The President of Indonesia, as the host of the Global Platform, encouraged the international community to enhance cooperation in disaster risk management through collaboration towards sustainable resilience based on the principles of strengthened risk reduction culture and education; investment in science, technology and innovation; climate and disaster resilient infrastructure; and implementation of global commitments. In the current global recovery, and in line with Indonesia’s G20 Presidency under the theme “Recover Together Recover Stronger,” the Global Platform provided a unique and timely opportunity to showcase the importance and value of inclusive and networked multilateralism, international solidarity and cooperation.
5. The Global Platform was preceded, on 23 and 24 May 2022, by the Third Multi Hazard Early Warning Conference, the Fifth session of the World Reconstruction Conference, the Stakeholder Engagement Forum, and the Local Leaders Forum.
Stocktaking of progress
6. The 2022 Global Platform took stock of the implementation of the Sendai Framework, based on the experience of practitioners and policy makers at local, national, and regional levels, progress reported by Member States through the Sendai Framework Monitor, the United Nations 2022 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, and other recent reports such as the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
7. Outcomes of Regional Platforms for Disaster Risk Reduction, hosted by the Governments of Jamaica, Morocco, Kenya and Portugal in 2021, also formed important inputs into the 2022 Global Platform. These platforms highlighted regional and transboundary cooperation, South-South cooperation, strengthening disaster loss and risk data, multi-hazard and impact-based early warning systems for anticipatory and early action, comprehensive school safety, promoting youth leadership, and heritage management. The inclusion of disaster risk reduction in the Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) was recognized as a key mechanism to promote risk-informed development.
8. Despite some advances, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not on track, and the full implementation of the Sendai Framework can help the international community get back on track towards the 2030 Agenda. Progress has been made in implementing the Sendai Framework and 155 countries, an increase of 33 percent since the 2019 Global Platform, are reporting through the Sendai Framework Monitor.
9. There had been a perceptible decline in disaster-related mortality from over 104,000 deaths per year in the 2000s to an average of 81,000 per year in the 2010s. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has halted this decline and reversed the trend. Disaster-related economic losses continue to rise.
10. Since the 2019 Global Platform, the number of countries reporting on the development of national disaster risk reduction strategies has increased by a third, now standing at 123 countries. Countries have reported an
increase in multi-hazard and multi-sectoral approaches and synergy with climate change adaptation planning.
11. While there has been some progress, such as in the development of new financing mechanisms and better linkages with climate action, the data still points to insufficient investment and progress in disaster risk reduction in most countries, especially in investing in prevention.
12. Risk understanding remains limited, in particular, of risk from emerging and future hazards, with government policies remaining largely reactive. Less than half of the countries reporting against Sendai Framework targets indicate having fit-for-purpose, accessible and actionable disaster risk information. Effective disaster risk management is often hindered by siloed, and limited intersectoral and transboundary approaches.
13. Despite wide-spread agreement that investment in multi-hazard early warning that leads to early action, as of April 2022, only 95 countries have reported on the existence of Multi-Hazard Early Warning Systems (MHEWS). Coverage in the least developed countries (LDCs), small island developing States (SIDS) and in African countries is particularly low.
14. At the time of the Global Platform, at least 84 countries were conducting national consultations and reviews, and developing reports as inputs to the Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework, together with multiple stakeholder and thematic consultations.
Taking the Sendai Framework implementation forward
15. The Global Platform was considered a wake-up call for countries to accelerate implementation across the Sendai Framework’s priorities to stop the spiral of increasing disaster impact and risk. A core recommendation was to apply a “Think Resilience” approach to all investments and decision making, and to integrate disaster risk reduction with the whole-of-government and whole-of-society.
16. Countries should further develop capacities to effectively monitor impacts, trends and developments in implementation of the Sendai Framework, with a view to closing data gaps. National development progress indicators should be aligned with those of the Sendai Framework in order to integrate risk reduction in the planning and decision-making processes towards sustainable development. Regional organizations should strengthen monitoring and reporting of progress of the Sendai Framework.
17. New and enhanced risk assessment approaches, such as predictive analytics and strategic foresight, should be supported at all levels. Countries need to be able to better assess the risk associated with cascading, compounding hazards and complex crises, by making data more readily available to implement long-term strategies. Assessment of biological, environmental and technological hazards, including those related to frontier risks, should be strengthened in line with a multi-hazard approach to disaster risk management.
18. There is an opportunity to move beyond a hazard-centric focus towards systemic risk analysis with vulnerability and exposure as core components. The climate emergency calls for a stronger focus on climate scenario development and modelling for risk assessment and stress testing infrastructure and capabilities for disaster risk management.
19. Further progress is needed to develop tools to synthesize the multitude of data generated by various sectors, including building interfaces between knowledge management systems. Data ecosystems, including for disaggregated data, need to be strengthened, including through enhanced interoperability across systems, as well as local knowledge feedback and expert opinion.
20. Collaboration with the private sector, for example, telecommunication and insurance, and the scientific community, opens opportunities to access, utilise and disseminate risk data and early warning along with use of open data sources. Collaboration with the civil society and media enables translating scientific information into action.
21. Risk dialogue and communication should be stepped up. Creative solutions and digital transformation to address communication barriers should be encouraged to strengthen a contextually relevant understanding of risk. Context specific and community friendly messages are needed. There is a need to promote traditional, local and indigenous knowledge and wisdom that have been tested and improved through generations across the world to further strengthen scientific practices and know-how and enhance efforts on awareness raising and education.
22. New systems should be designed applying behavioural science and factoring in the role of people’s perceptions of risk and cognitive biases towards strengthening a societal culture of risk and resilience. Risk reduction can be accelerated when products and services are designed and tested to consider how communities take decisions about managing risk.
23. Disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation have the common objective of reducing vulnerability and enhancing capacity and resilience. A comprehensive disaster and climate risk management approach is key to making the shift towards integrated plans and policies, supported by shared risk understanding and inclusive institutions. Convergence of public budgets prevents fragmentation of resources which are already limited, while unlocking climate and disaster-related finance. Such comprehensive approaches should be further extended to the most vulnerable sectors, such as the agricultural sector that absorbs most disaster losses.
24. Scaling up comprehensive disaster and climate risk management, especially in fragile and highly vulnerable contexts, is beyond the remit of a single organization and requires broad partnerships. The recently launched Centre of Excellence for Climate and Disaster Resilience is a collective effort of disaster risk reduction, climate change and humanitarian agencies to accelerate preventive action, especially for those most at risk of being left behind.
25. Regional and transboundary cooperation in disaster risk reduction including MHEWS and data exchange have proven to be very effective and should be promoted. The role of regional organizations in accelerating Sendai Framework implementation should be further strengthened.
26. Experiences shared demonstrated the value of promoting national-local linkages and peer-to-peer exchange among local authorities for strengthening local resilience and capacity. Support at the local level, including urban, peri-urban, and rural, must be strengthened through innovative approaches to resilience building and through partnerships in pursuit of SDG 11, such as Making Cities Resilient 2030 (MCR2030).
27. Disaster risk reduction leadership must be more inclusive. More can be done to strengthen gender equality and the participation of women and girls in decision-making, implementation, and leadership. Specific targets and timelines to achieve gender balance and a gender action plan to achieve the Sendai Framework should be established. Policies and programmes must also be supported by an understanding of gender dimensions of disaster risk. Greater investment in women-led civil society organizations and networks should be facilitated for their meaningful participation in and influence on decision-making.
28. Furthermore, educating youth and partnering with them on disaster risk management ensures that their participation in resilience-building actions is extended to policy-making with intergenerational impact. Involving persons with disabilities in design, planning, and leadership ensures the disaster risk reduction measures can protect them and reduce their vulnerabilities. Biases should be recognized, and enablers, opportunities and barriers should be assessed to frame appropriate policies and programmes.
29. Provisions to address disaster displacement and other forms of human mobility should be included in national, local and regional disaster risk reduction policies and strategies, as done by some countries. The risk of disaster displacement should be assessed and reduced, including through addressing the underlying causes of such displacement and preparing for its adverse consequences.
30. International funding streams should consider the absorptive capacity and debt burden of developing countries. Access to finance should be facilitated, and national and local capacities to develop bankable projects that support resilience and empower communities should be strengthened. Alternative measures to direct investments beyond gross domestic product, such as the use of a multidimensional vulnerability index, can help target funding for prevention and resilience building.
31. Innovative and decentralized disaster risk reduction financing ensures that resources reach communities and individuals before disaster strikes. This can be enabled through provisions in sub-national and local government budgets for managing localized losses, pooled funding at the local level, and pre-arranged financial and institutional arrangements.
32. Incentivizing investment in disaster risk reduction requires accounting for how investments impact exposure and vulnerability across systems and incorporating projected impacts into investment decisions. Current and projected risks need to be internalized into public and private sector financing.
33. Governments need to de-risk all investments and incentivize ex-ante long-term risk reduction and resilience building through an enabling legal and regulatory environment for public and private investment. As the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need for predictable and sustainable investment in rebuilding and strengthening health systems, particularly at the community level, to ensure equity.
34. The private sector has a key role to play by fostering risk-informed business behaviour that includes disclosure of risk, communication of their contribution to resilience building, and workplace safety, among others. More must be done to strengthen the resilience of micro, small and medium enterprises, including raising awareness of and capacity to apply tools to support business continuity planning, addressing interdependencies and inequities across value and supply chains, and targeted micro-finance.
35. Infrastructure resilience is the cornerstone of sustainable development. Understanding of risk to infrastructure as well as to the services it provides, together with land-use planning, should be a key consideration. Industry-specific tools, such as rating standards to guide investment decisions in infrastructure, including in the real estate, are useful towards the development of sector-specific standards. The Global Platform expressed the need for principles and standards for resilient infrastructure to safeguard global infrastructure investments.
36. While nature is at risk from climate change and disasters, it also offers solutions to build resilience. Ecosystems should be considered as critical infrastructure and recognized for their basic services, bringing environmental, socio-economic and cultural benefits. Assessment of disaster losses and damages should include valuation of ecosystem-related losses. Nature-based solutions should be integrated in plans and policies. They become more effective in delivering socio-economic benefits when they are designed with local communities who fully understand their land and region. Such approaches help unlock untapped funding streams, such as green and blue bonds and blended finance.
37. Protection gaps should be minimized through investments in social protection and affordable insurance solutions through premium and capital support, combined with micro-finance and forecast-based financing. The insurance sector must incentivize risk reduction and prevention, thereby minimizing residual risk and cost of insurance. Social protection must be adaptive and shock responsive, so that it can be scaled-up rapidly before a disaster strikes and as part of recovery and rehabilitation to mitigate socio-economic impacts. A significant increase in investments in such social protection schemes is required, and an enabling ecosystem at the local level to ensure inclusive participation encouraged.
38. “Building Back Better” from the COVID-19 pandemic is yet to be turned into action. The COVID-19 pandemic and response to it have deepened inequalities and vulnerabilities and derailed development pathways for the poorest and most at risk. The Global Platform called to account for the dynamic nature of vulnerability and intersecting vulnerabilities in risk assessments, planning and financing.
39. The principle to leave no one behind is the central, transformative promise of the 2030 Agenda. The Global Platform recognised the contribution of the non-State stakeholders in building resilience at all levels. Over 600 organizations have made voluntary commitments towards implementing the Sendai Framework and continue to report on their implementation.
40. Currently, the vast majority of public spending in recovery has been allocated to infrastructure and not in support of affected people. Recovery and reconstruction are most successful when they are community-driven, and address inequalities through gender responsive and human-rights based approaches.
41. Pre-disaster planning and Post-Disaster Needs Assessments (PDNAs) should go beyond damage and loss to include wider socio-economic impacts. This approach is more effective in ensuring socially transformative outcomes with long-term benefits for reducing poverty and inequality.
42. Methods to evaluate the effectiveness of early warning systems should be strengthened. Cadres of community early warning volunteers can have a significant impact and must be linked with official systems.
43. Disaster risk reduction should be integrated into the humanitarian-development-peace nexus to overcome the protracted and recurrent nature of crises and strengthen local and global food security. Countries affected by conflict and humanitarian crises warrant greater attention. Joint risk assessments and activities supported by flexible, predictable and multi-year financing for disaster risk reduction, can foster mutually reinforcing and more resilient outcomes for disaster risk reduction, climate action, and sustaining peace.
Final Considerations and The Way Forward
44. To achieve the 2030 Agenda, disaster risk reduction must be integrated at the core of development and finance policies, legislation and plans. The Global Platform called for transformation of risk governance mechanisms to ensure that management of risk is a shared responsibility across sectors, systems, scales and borders. Examples show that working transversally across ministries and departments at all levels can help governments break institutional silos.
45. Only through systemic changes can we account for the real cost of disasters as well as the cost of inaction and weigh it against investments in disaster risk reduction. Good examples of demonstrated political commitment in the form of legislated budgetary targets and tracking mechanisms for disaster risk reduction are emerging, which should be promoted and replicated. Dedicated disaster risk reduction financing strategies direct and prioritize investment and should be included in integrated national financing frameworks.
46. Convened at the mid-point between COP 26 and COP 27, the Global Platform observed that current emission levels far exceed their mitigation, resulting in an increase in frequency and intensity of catastrophic events, threatening the achievement of the 2030 Agenda. The Global Platform called upon governments to honour the commitments made in Glasgow to drastically enhance financing for and support to adaptation and resilience. There is an urgent need to scale-up disaster risk reduction as part of the solution to address the climate emergency, while raising and achieving the climate ambition. The Global Goal on Adaptation and the Santiago Network as part of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage offer timely opportunities to make disaster risk reduction mechanisms and instruments an integral part of climate action.
47. People are affected differently by disasters. This calls for a participatory and human rights-based approach to include all under a principle of “nothing about us without us” in disaster risk reduction planning and implementation. Investments in youth and young professionals should therefore be enhanced to stimulate innovation and creative solutions. There should be a recommitment to community engagement and to disaster risk reduction that is community-driven and child-centric and supports existing local structures and resilience building.
48. The Global Platform provided recommendations that can support the implementation of the call by the United Nations Secretary-General to ensure every person on Earth is protected by early warning systems within five years. The response to the call should consider the end-to-end people-centered early warning value chain – from risk assessments to infrastructure and community last-mile outreach. Early warning systems must be multi-hazard and should be inclusive of communities most at risk with adequate institutional, financial and human capacity to act on early warnings. Better availability and quality of data, financial resources, effective governance and coordination arrangements among stakeholders will strengthen MHEWS particularly in LDCs, SIDS and African countries.
49. Potentially transformative lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic must be applied before the window of opportunity closes. Current approaches to recovery and reconstruction are not sufficiently effective in protecting development gains nor in building back better, greener and more equitably. There is a need to encourage an adaptive, responsive disaster risk management system with multi-stakeholder collaboration accompanied by empathy, solidarity, cooperation, and a spirit of volunteerism, in particular to address inequity.
50. Comprehensive and systematic reporting, including a robust review of progress made against all Sendai Framework targets by countries will help draw clear recommendations for the Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework. The Global Platform made a strong call to all Member States, regional organizations, and stakeholders to engage in the Midterm Review to clearly understand the implementation challenges and obstacles and possible course corrections to accelerate efforts to achieve the Sendai Framework goal by 2030.
51. Member States are also encouraged to leverage the Midterm Review to enhance integration of disaster risk reduction in forthcoming intergovernmental processes, including the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and the 2023 SDG Summit, COP 27 and the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement, and the Midterm Comprehensive Review of the Implementation of the Objectives of the International Decade for Action “Water for Sustainable Development” 2018-2028, among others.
52. Innovations shared and commitments made at the Global Platform provide valuable input for the implementation of the United Nations Secretary-General’s vision for “Our Common Agenda”. Similarly, the contribution of the Global Platform to the review of the SAMOA Pathway for SIDS and the Vienna Programme of Action for the Landlocked Developing Countries and the development of their successor agreements, as well as the implementation of the Doha Programme of Action for the LDCs, will ensure risk reduction is embedded across key intergovernmental agreements that focus on most vulnerable countries.
