Launch of Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR2019)
SRSGs REMARKS AT LAUNCH OF GLOBAL ASSESSMENT REPORT
ON DISASTER RISK REDUCTION (GAR2019)
Geneva, 15 May 2019
[Salutations]
Ambassador Khan, Professor Revi,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Time is running out for a world at risk.
We are four years into the implementation phase of the Sendai Framework. We have just 11 years left to deliver what we all agreed in Sendai was imperative –that is, to move towards a world more free of risk, where resilient, equitable and sustainable development can be made real.
We are launching this fifth edition of the United Nations Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) at a time of heightened global urgency. At no point in human history have we faced such an array of both familiar and unfamiliar risks, interacting in a hyperconnected, rapidly changing world.
Threats that were once considered inconceivable, no longer are. Non-linear change is a reality and undermining social, environmental and economic efforts to realize sustainable development. Change is occurring more quickly and surprisingly than previously thought possible, and we have learned that we can no longer use the past as a reliable indicator of the future.
The 2019 Global Assessment Report - or GAR2019 - recognizes the limitations in our current ability to predict the future of risk. The Sendai Framework was forward looking in compelling us to to address man-made and natural hazards and risks together, and the GAR takes this one step further, highlighting that risk really is systemic, and that it requires concerted and urgent effort to reduce it in integrated and innovative ways.
Eight years ago we were given a stark insight into the systemic nature of risk, when the Tohoku earthquake caused a 400km stretch of the eastern coastline of Japan to drop by 60cm. This meant that the resulting tsunami overtopped sea walls, taking thousands of lives. It led to a nuclear accident which in turn brought population displacement, damage to agriculture and worldwide concern about the safety of nuclear power.
The Sendai Framework reflects the certainty that in an ever more networked world, the very nature and scale of risk has changed, to such a degree that it surpasses established risk management approaches and institutions. Recent events – such as large-scale prolonged drought and heatwaves, financial and commodity market crashes, large scale and long-term human migration, cybervulnerabilities and political upheavals – can generate diverse, simultaneous types of damage and destruction to vital infrastructure and support systems of societies and economies.
Combine the scale of change with our attitude to it, and we seem to be sleep walking off a cliff: as we pursue economic growth with little concern for risk governance, the destruction of the environment, loss of biodiversity or the odds we are stacking against ourselves through greenhouse gas emissions and anthropogenic global warming.
Disaster impacts – amplified by security challenges, fast-paced urbanization, and rising inequalities – are increasingly deadly, destructive and costly, and they disproportionately affect the most vulnerable segment of world’s population.
Exposure to disaster risk is on the rise. Unplanned urbanization is creating risk at an unparalleled rate particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Structural vulnerability keeps people living on marginal lands and in poor housing, exposed to earthquakes, landslides, floods, storms, drought and heatwaves.
We are witnessing severe inequalities of burden sharing between low- and high-income countries. The poorest bear the highest toll of disasters, with asset and human losses generally higher in countries that have the least capacity to prevent the creation of risk, or to mitigate and respond to shocks.
The Sendai Framework demands immediate action across all seven Targets, with Target (e), which is the development of national and local strategies for disaster risk reduction to be achieved by 2020 if the rest are to be realized by 2030.
Extreme changes in planetary and socio-ecological systems are happening now. We no longer have the luxury of procrastination. If we continue living in this way, engaging with each other and the planet in the way we do, then our very survival as a species is in doubt.
The responsibility to deal with risk, is both a collective and individual one. While governments must incentivize and lead risk reduction, we, as individuals must own the consequences of our choices, our decisions, and the risks that we create, propagate or prevent and reduce.
It is a choice; we must honestly review how our relationship with behaviour and choice transfers to risk creation, or its reduction. We must also acknowledge that not all of us have the same opportunity to make positive choices. Location, age, gender, income group, disability, and access to/ benefit from social protection schemes and safety nets greatly affect people’s ability to anticipate, prevent and mitigate risks.
GAR2019 represents a major step towards a twenty-first century view of risk and its reduction – an understanding that is imperative in our collective efforts to craft a sustainable future.
It is my sincere hope that this Global Assessment Report will contribute to the growing demand for change that is evident across the world.
The urgency is evident, self-explanatory and undeniable. It demands much greater ambition around the speed and magnitude of the changes the global community needs to make; changes that must be proportionate to the scale of threat.
We must seize this moment to be the change we want to see. We must break the cycle of disaster-response-recovery. We must manage our existing levels of risk and above all, stop creating new risks.
Today, I call on Governments and all stakeholders to recognize the part you must play – now – so that together we can move towards the realization of the outcome, goals and targets of the Sendai Framework and the 2030 Agenda. For the good of the planet and all humanity.
Thank you for your attention.