“If I had to select one sentence to describe the state of the world, I would say we are in a world in which global challenges are more and more integrated, and the responses are more and more fragmented, and if this is not reversed, it’s a recipe for disaster.” 

António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, January 2019

Multiple Breadbasket Failure

While it can be practical to categorize risk so that we can delegate responsibility to different organizations, institutions or individuals, we need to incentivize transdisciplinary, integrated, multisectoral risk assessment and decision-making to improve efficiency, reduce duplication of effort and allow for connected, collective action.           

Understanding risk means understanding what we know, what we don’t know, and even perhaps trying to grapple with what we know we don’t know. Risk is complex. We need to understand how to deal with it without resorting to reductive measures that isolate and ignore the systemic nature of risk. We must push back against institutions, governance approaches and research modalities that treat risks in isolation and outside of their socioecological and socioeconomic contexts.

The Sendai Framework takes an interconnected and pluralistic approach to understanding risk. It recognises that the behaviour of systems is non-linear. And it includes a broad spectrum of hazards beyond the natural to include the human-made. It exhorts us to make a fundamental shift in the way in which we develop and use information to make our decisions – away from the deliberate simplification of a problem and its causes by removing it from its context.

We must break away from the prevailing practice of compartmentalized research, hazard-by-hazard risk assessment and management if we are to improve our understanding of complex systems and risk and collectively identify solutions. This applies as much to our institutional configurations and mechanisms for risk governance, as it does to community organization, our research endeavours, and macro-economic policy. For more, see GAR2019 Chapter 2, Parts I, II and III. 

Risk, impact and capacity to cope evolve throughout a person’s life cycle. Vulnerabilities may emerge and change, compound and persist over long periods leading to disparities in income, inequalities based on gender roles, ethnicity, household and social status. This can contribute to the intergenerational transmission of vulnerability and widening inequalities. 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 the choices people have to anticipate, prevent and mitigate risks. This is particularly evident in conflict-affected countries.

With the cumulative and cascading nature of vulnerability, we need timely interventions to effectively protect those groups whose vulnerability profiles (many of these structural and many tied to the life cycle) make them more susceptible to disaster risk. However, to better understand vulnerabilities we need systematic effort and sustained funding for integrated risk assessment and disaggregated data collection. For more, see GAR2019 Parts I, II and III.  

Climate risk is a major driver and amplifier of disaster losses and failed development. It amplifies risk. Decades-old projections about climate change have come true much sooner than we expected and at a calamitous scale. The global warming threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels that the Paris Agreement sought to cap, will be surpassed in the late 2030s / early 2040s. Worse, the IPCC estimates that if countries restrict effort to the commitments made in the Paris Agreement, we are looking at warming in the realm of 2.9°C – 3.4°C. Non-linear change in hazard intensity and frequency is already a reality.

Emergent climate-related risks will alter most of our current risk metrics. Risk reduction processes have multiple connections with climate change mitigation, adaptation and vulnerability reduction. And yet few disaster risk reduction plans take these connections into account.

The IPCC 2018 Special Report presents new evidence on climate change – that was not available to us when the Sendai Framework was adopted – identifying that we must be more ambitious about the speed and magnitude of the changes we need to make. For more, see GAR2019 Chapters 6 and 13. 

The multilateral approach to global development and global policy is facing significant challenges. The benefits of socioeconomic development, economic integration and trade are shared by a limited number of countries, leaving others with constrained policy space to negotiate terms commensurate with their needs. There is growing evidence that the benefits of increasing economic integration have not been equitably shared among and within countries. Unsustainable patterns of growth hide the build-up of systemic risks across different sectors which will severely disrupt economic activity and inflict long-term damage to sustainable development.

We witness severe inequalities of burden sharing between low- and high-income countries, with the poorest bearing the highest toll and greatest costs of disasters. In recognizing this challenge, the Sendai Framework Target (F) calls for enhanced international cooperation to developing countries and allowing space for countries to adopt effective policies that enhance domestic public finance for risk-informed sustainable development.

“If solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.” 

Greta Thunberg, Sweden, youth advocate for global action on climate change

 International cooperation must be predicated on an equitable and accessible system that recognizes the vulnerability inherent in differing stages of socioeconomic development. Reform of financial systems is essential – notably those that tie countries into debt mechanisms from which it is difficult to escape. For more, see GAR2019 Parts I and II. 

Governments have a responsibility for creating an environment in which people prosper and the planet thrives. This is non-negotiable. Investing in risk reduction is investing in the public good, but political cycles, competitive agendas and strained budgets make planning and taking responsibility for delivering change difficult. Despite the evidence that no one – individual or country – is immune to risk, budgeting for the ‘what if?’ does not come naturally to governments. But planning and risk-informed investment is common sense and should be translated into action. Being able to generate and collect robust data, define risk and then implement initiatives that respond accordingly, make for smart decisions and investments.

The Sendai Framework Target (E) requires governments to develop aligned national and local disaster risk reduction strategies and is the only target that is to be met by 2020. These national and local DRR strategies are the foundation for the achievement of the 2030 targets. Progress has been steady, but we are not on track to meet the 2020 target. For more, see GAR2019 Parts II and III.

Without accurate evidence of where we currently stand, we cannot confidently chart our path forward. Turning the aspirations of risk-informed sustainable development into reality, will require robust data and statistics that are timely, accurate, disaggregated, people-centred and accessible, that enable us to capture progress and direct investments accordingly.

Data is traditionally the province of the equipped and the funded. Many national governments do not have the capacity to analyse and use data, even if they have the means to collect them. Development actors and the private sector have the capacity, but the true dividends of interoperable, convergent data and analytics are missed. While integrated monitoring and reporting on the Sendai Framework and the Sustainable Development Goals is a reality – thanks to use of common metrics and the online Sendai Framework Monitor (SFM) – data collection is fragmented, non-universal, not commeasurable and biased. There is often a disconnect between “knowing” something, making it “available and accessible” and “applying” what is known. It is critical that momentum is not lost and that coordinated, integrated global and national efforts strengthening data generation, statistical capacity and reporting continue.

We cannot expect good plans in the absence of good data. We must resist the temptation to own data. We must commit to open data platforms, and data sets that seek accuracy and honesty so as to show the real picture. For more, see GAR2019 Parts I and II.

Individual and Collective Responsibility

gar.unisdr.org 

https://www.preventionweb.net/disaster-risk/graf