UNDRR News

The Prime Minister of Senegal has reiterated her country’s commitment to implementing the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) during high level talks with the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction. Prime Minister Aminata Touré said that Senegal’s international commitments were consistent with domestic priorities under the country’s Economic and Social Development Plan. In the presence of nine of her key ministers, the Prime Minister told Special Representative Ms Margareta Wahlström that good governance and institutions were crucial to build resilience in the face of continued climate change.

Latin America has taken a step towards mainstreaming disaster risk reduction into national development policy instruments and poverty reduction strategies. The Latin American Parliament has adopted a protocol on disaster risk management that obliges its 23 member states to incorporate guiding principles of building resilience into existing or emerging legislation. The adoption of the protocol comes ahead of the 2014 Americas Regional Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction, to be held in Ecuador, in May.

The French capital, Paris, has been invited to join the “Making Cities Resilient” Campaign by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction as a new OECD analysis reveals the extent of the city’s exposure to a repeat of a major flood disaster. The OECD Review on Flood Risk Management of the Seine River – commissioned by Etablissement Public Territorial de Bassin (EPTB) Seine Grands Lacs, with the Ministry of Ecology and Ile-de-France Regional Council – found that a repeat of the 1910 flood could affect up to five million residents and cause Euros 30 billion worth of damages. Speaking at the launch of the report, UNISDR Chief, Margareta Wahlström, said: “Making Paris resilient is an important strategic goal for France. Floods displace more people worldwide, create more unemployment and disrupt city life more than any other category of disaster.

The Head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), Margareta Wahlström, today welcomed Russia’s declared intention of using its G8 Presidency to promote integrated disaster risk management and to focus the world’s major economies on cooperation in developing a new global agreement on disaster risk reduction to succeed the existing Hyogo Framework for Action which expires in March 2015. Ms. Wahlström said: “Russia’s G8 Presidency could be a major turning point in the struggle to gain political commitment to reducing exposure to disaster events worldwide and speeding up implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action. Economic losses from disasters are out of control and the timing is right for the G8 members to take concrete measures to mitigate climate change and to reduce the risk of major disaster events such as floods and earthquakes which disrupt the lives of over 200 million people every year.” At a meeting of the Gaidar Forum in Moscow last week, the Russian G8 Sherpa, Alexei Kvasov, said the core objectives of the Russian G8 Presidency will include global management of natural and man-made disaster risks along with global health security, the fights against drugs and global terrorism. He said the motto of Russia’s G8 Presidency is “Managing risks for sustainable growth in a secure world.” Ms. Wahlström said UNISDR and its partners look forward to contributing to the success of the Russian G8 Presidency and building on expressions of support at previous G8 Summits for implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters.

United Nations agencies have joined together to contribute towards the development a new Strategy for Disaster and Climate Resilient Development in the Pacific (SRDP). As a core partner of the Technical Working Group for the new Strategy along with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) and Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) hosted and engaged expert representatives from UNDP, UNICEF, WHO and UN Women amongst others, to join in an interactive engagement workshop on 20 January 2014. The workshop formed part of a series of ongoing stakeholder engagements to facilitate the development of a new strategy to succeed the current ‘Pacific Disaster Risk Reduction and Disaster Management Framework for Action’ and ‘Pacific Islands Framework for Action on Climate Change’, both due to expire in 2015.

UNDRR has teamed up with the global insurance industry to propose a major new approach to catastrophe risk financing for the PH in advance of this year’s typhoon season as the country continues to deal with the economic fall-out of $13 billion in losses.

The future resilience of the planet rests upon shortening the distance between emerging scientific evidence and actionable policy. A High-Level Panel, titled ‘Perspectives on the Value of Earth Observations’, agreed on the importance of the “usability of information” in the International Strategy of Disaster Reduction and other global efforts to strengthen resilience. Mr Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), said collaboration and coordination was crucial: “We need to join up the dots about what we know about how resources can be used and not be used in future. “The world really is heading terribly in the wrong direction. We need to bring science to decision making. And in such a complex world, we can no longer afford the luxury of taking very narrow, specific responses.

– A comprehensive study has outlined the path towards a standardized European approach to systematically record and manage disaster loss databases. The report, titled ‘Recording Disaster Losses: Recommendations for a European approach’, is in response to the European Union’s desire to find a mechanism to record systematically disaster losses and provide European loss data to international initiatives so that global trends can be charted. “Risk assessment requires accurate recording of previous disasters and in particular the associated losses in terms of human casualties, property and environment damage as well as economic loss,” the report says.

“Disaster risk reduction should not be seen only as an imperative to protecting investments in development, but also as an opportunity for a transformative shift towards resilient development.” This rousing statement from disaster-prone Bangladesh was one of several calls from governments for disaster and climate risk considerations to be incorporated at every stage of development. The seventh session of the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals heard consistent support for the integration of disaster risk management within each sector that may be addressed by the goals, such as poverty eradication, energy, health, food security.

More than 100 of the world’s leading food system researchers, practitioners and policymakers heard today how dynamic new approaches are strengthening risk management and resilience. The forum, titled ‘Visualising the World’s Food Systems to Better Manage Risk and Resilience’, was told that ‘the new normal’ of fast-accelerating demand for food, energy and water in a changing climate and era of volatility had potentially devastating human and environmental consequences. As the global population grows from 7 billion to almost 9 billion by 2040, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, the demand for resources will rise exponentially.