A gender, age, disability, and cultural perspective should be integrated into all policies and practices, including an emphasis on promoting women and youth leadership.
Disasters do discriminate. They tend to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, especially the poorest.
This is why the Sendai Framework calls for an all-of-society engagement and partnership. Governments should engage with relevant stakeholders, including women, children and youth, persons with disabilities, poor people, migrants, indigenous peoples, volunteers, the community of practitioners and older persons in the design and implementation of policies, plans and standards.
Empowering young people is the world’s best chance of building resilient communities as they comprise the largest and most interconnected generation in history. Yet, young people are particularly vulnerable to disasters. Contributing as powerful change actors and resilience-builders, young people must be part of disaster risk reduction action
Persons with disabilities are often disproportionally affected by disasters and have different and uneven levels of resilience and capacity to recover. Many are socially or logistically isolated and lack access to evacuation warnings and appropriate transportation for themselves, for those who care for them and any medical equipment necessary for their well-being.
Women, girls, boys, men, and people of diverse gender identities have distinct vulnerabilities in each context that shape the way that they experience and recover from disaster impacts. Effective disaster risk reduction requires meaningful and diverse participation, engagement and leadership, through an inclusive and accessible, all-of-society approach.
Women’s participation in decision-making is enshrined in international human rights frameworks including the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, yet there is still great disparity in the number of women playing a leadership role in disaster risk management.
Indigenous Peoples are on the front line of rapidly increasing disaster risk and climate change and environmental degradation because of their close relationship with the environment and its resources. While they are the holders of the traditional knowledge enabling better understanding of hazards, they are also the one disproportionally affected by disasters. It's time to change that - we are launching a new campaign to promote the change.
Nothing lays bare inequality and discrimination like a disaster. It is this inequality and exclusion which drives vulnerability.
Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction
Of the 1.47 billion people who are exposed to flood risk, 89 percent live in low- and middle-income countries - World Bank, 2020
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is the human dimension of disasters and is the result of the range of economic, social, cultural, institutional, political and psychological factors that shape people’s lives and the environment that they live in.
To better understand how disasters impact different members of a community, the Sendai Framework calls for “the open exchange and dissemination of disaggregated data, including by sex, age and disability”. To date, many challenges hinder the collection of disaggregated data such as additional costs, time and resources, data privacy concerns, and outdated data infrastructure.
