UNDRR News

Investing in reducing disaster and climate risk is vital for the sustainable development and the future resilience of the citizens of SIDS. We must all come together towards implementing the Sendai Framework so that this becomes a reality.

It is now seven years since the International Conference on Small Island Developing States took place in Samoa and adopted the SIDS Accelerated Modalities of Action Pathway, known as the SAMOA Pathway. The Pacific has become a role model on how to integrate disaster risk management, climate change adaptation and sustainable development goals. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, in the context of the mid-term review of the Sendai Framework, which has just started and will culminate in the year 2023, is now looking at how best to support SIDS to overcome the specific constraints they are facing in reducing their disaster losses.

However rare they might be, tsunamis are the single most deadly of all sudden onset natural hazards. Millions of people live and work in tsunami-exposed communities across the world’s oceans.

A Multi-Hazard Early Warning/Early Action Conference was convened from 20-22 October 2021 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Tajikistan’s Committee of Emergency Situations and Civil Defense conducted a Consultation Workshop on the Tajikistan Disaster Risk Management System Capacity Assessment, gathering a wide range of stakeholders from different sectors.

In the wake of the 2004 tsunami, coastal forests helped dampen damage from the tsunami. Building on this, an Indonesian NGO called 'Yagasu' are using mangroves to bolster ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction, improve local livelihood, and aid in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

The consultation workshop came to validate the newly developed Disaster Risk Reduction governance structure for the DRR national platform in Lebanon.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Jordan organized a commemoration of the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, under the patronage of the National Center for Security and Crises Management, and the participation of the UNDRR Regional Office for Arab States (ROAS), World Food Programme in Jordan, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The commemoration took place along the National Consultation Workshop to update the National Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction organized and coordinated by UNDRR ROAS.

The compound effects of these events with the COVID-19 pandemic during the last 18-months, clearly demonstrates the need for greater investment in disaster risk reduction and a multi-hazard approach to disaster risk management. Europe has seen a number of dramatic events across its territory, many of which exacerbated by the impacts of climate change. Climate extreme events such as flooding and wild fires have caused great trauma across different regions of Europe, as seen with the dramatic forest fires in Greece and the Mediterranean basin, floods affecting Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg this summer and only recently in parts of France, to name but a few. Other natural disasters such as the volcanic eruption severely affecting the Canary Islands demonstrate the very complex risk landscape across the European region and the extent to which solidarity and cooperation in these difficult times is critical.

Ever increasing numbers of people are losing their homes and livelihoods in extreme weather events, such as those which displaced 30 million people last year. There has been a shocking escalation of world hunger to the point where over two billion people struggled to feed themselves adequately in 2020 and 811 million people face chronic hunger. As successive FAO reports have demonstrated, a doubling of disaster events over the last twenty years has had a huge impact on food production, especially in developing countries with strong dependence on the agricultural sector, not least through drought, pests, floods, storms, heatwaves, and rising sea levels.