Read this section to learn more about systemic risk and the findings of the Global Assessment Report. 

Where do we stand? 

Key challenges:

Systemic risk, like all risk, is the result of the interrelationship of hazard, exposure and vulnerability with resilience. These variables are socially constructed through a range of underlying drivers, including poverty and inequality, badly planned and managed urban and infrastructure development, environmental degradation, climate change, conflict, displacement and weak governance. Additionally, risk-related decisions are influenced by human nature where risk perception and biases can override scientific facts. Prevailing political economy may also set barriers to address and prioritise some of the drivers that shape risk. 

Key opportunities: 

By managing risk across disciplines, understanding the systemic characteristics of its root causes and drivers, and by creating synergies among global agendas DRR can be used as a tool to accelerate the 2030 Agenda. This way we can counter current setbacks in reaching the Sendai Framework Targets and the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Behavioural science offers an opportunity to improve risk management outcomes and long-term change. We need to consider how human minds perceive risk and make decisions in order to adapt and reconfigure regulatory and incentive systems as well as market risk reduction products and services.

Risk management and communication can be steered towards co-design and data driven consultative decision making that gives agency to end users. Knowledge beyond conventional risk data is needed for better understanding of the systemic impacts of risk. Outputs of scientific risk models can be complemented with traditional knowledge. 

Systemic risk modelling is advancing rapidly and is a game changer for risk management. To be successful we need to collaborate beyond traditional sectors and disciplines. Risk governance systems must address the challenges of economy, environment, and equity as a whole while also tackling structural inequalities, vulnerability and exposure. 

Session guiding questions 

• What do we need to know and understand about systemic risk to enable us to manage it at global, regional and national but also local level? 
• How has the risk management context changed since 2015, and how should this guide how we accelerate or (re-)engineer modalities for risk management and risk governance, in the remaining period of the Sendai Framework, until 2030? 
• What are key obstacles towards public sector and private sector and societal resilience across different sectors and SDGs, while facing climate extremes? (Data, knowledge, perception, governance, or compliance?) 
• What is needed to foster and empower policy makers action, especially in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic?

Read this section to learn more about the topic of innovative and transformative financing for resilience, ensuring you come prepared to the session. 

Where do we stand? 

While financing for disaster risk reduction has received significant attention, with high-level events and publications emphasizing the need for financing, key challenges remain. These include: 

• Lack of specific measures to ensure resilience to future disasters. 
• Insufficient financing for prevention.  
• Lack of incentives for stakeholders to invest in prevention and resilience. 
• Lack of comprehensive and layered financial strategies.  

At the same time, there are opportunities which could put us on the path to sustainability and resilience. These include: 

• Accelerate financing in prevention through mechanisms such as blended finance, Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) standards, bonds and integrated national financing frameworks (INFFs).  
• Mainstreaming of disaster risk reduction in the activities of financial institutions. 
• Introduce prevention as a key criterion in ESG standards, as well as in existing bonds (climate-resilience bonds, green bonds, social and sustainability linked bonds), to help leverage finance for prevention, adaptation and mitigation actions. 
• Identify paths for improved cooperation between sectors and stakeholders for holistic decision-making and implementation of options 

Session guiding questions 

• In what ways are current finance models contributing or not contributing to resilience? What barriers need to be removed? 
• What sorts of innovative models are there that could be scaled up and implemented in different contexts?
• What policies and incentives for financing should be put in place to meaningfully engage different stakeholders?
• How can we ensure that humanitarian, development, DRR and climate change financing mechanisms support resilience in a more coherent, efficient and effective manner?

Read this section to learn more about the topic of disaster risk reduction in the context of protracted crises and complex emergencies, ensuring you come prepared for the session.  

Where do we stand

In a world where humanitarian emergencies, driven by conflicts, violent insecurity, human-induced global warming and the recent COVID-19 pandemic, do not cease to decrease, better understanding systemic risk and implementing DRR approaches is a necessity. Key challenges needing to be addressed include: 

• Systemic and multi-hazard nature of risk blurs the boundaries between individual risk factors, threats, borders and sectors. 
• Complexity of protracted crises and humanitarian emergencies renders controlling hazards and threats particularly difficult for the actors involved, as it is often outside of their mandates and capacities. 
• Difficulty of addressing root risk drivers, such as inequality, and key barriers to DRR implementation, such as siloed financing and planning 

Parallelly, key opportunities for addressing DRR in humanitarian contexts include

• Implementing joint approaches across the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus, where a very diverse range of actors can cooperate and complement each other’s activities, for example in terms of risk analysis and DRR planning. 
• Jointly addressing the intersectional vulnerability associated with conflict contexts is a practical and important way of reducing risk. 
• Developing multi-year and flexible financing allows humanitarian-development actors and communities to plan ahead. 

Session guiding questions

• How must risk assessment and analysis be adapted to account for the unique characteristics that make reducing disaster risk different in complex emergencies? 
• What are the gaps in addressing DRR in crisis settings and how might these be overcome? 
• What collaboration is needed between HDP nexus organizations, Government agencies and donors to reduce drivers of risk? 
• What kinds of changes are needed in our financing and partnership modalities to unlock disaster risk reduction bottlenecks in complex emergency settings? 

Read this section to learn more about the topic of Nature-based Solutions for disaster risk reduction, ensuring you come prepared for the session. 

Where do we stand 

NbS for DRR and CCA are being implemented worldwide. Yet, their inclusion in national and local DRR and CCA strategies is still rare, and no country has reported on them in the Sendai Framework Monitor. This session will be an opportunity to identify and tackle the main challenges related to NbS implementation in DRR: 

• Lack of financing, technology transfers and innovative solutions for the implementation of NbS in DRR/CCA 
• Lack of awareness on the benefits provided by NbS 
• Lack of knowledge on efficacy parameters (i.e. thresholds) and key performance indicators 

NbS offer the following opportunities for reducing disaster risk: 

• Improved knowledge and awareness of dynamics of hazards, exposure, vulnerabilities and resilience of both societies and ecosystems 
• Synchronization of NbS for DRR/CCA with programmes targeted to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate risks and socioeconomic inequalities; 
• Integration of risk-based decision making in sectoral policies and planning, e.g. agriculture, fishery, aquaculture and forestry 
• Better harmony of individuals and communities with nature 

Session guiding questions

• What is the added value of NbS implementation to systemic risk reduction? 
• How can we scale up NbS good practices for DRR/CCA under different institutional and disaster contexts? 
• What is needed to strategically integrate NbS in DRR/CCA decision-making that also contributes to the achievement of multiple societal objectives? 
• What are the barriers to the implementation of NbS for DRR and how can we strategically address these through innovative approaches? 
• Which financing mechanisms are available to enable NbS? 

Join the session to learn more about the latest practices in multi-hazard and multi-sector risk assessments, established to meet the challenges emerging from increasingly interconnected and systemic risks. 

Where do we stand? 

A survey by the OECD highlighted that while many countries had strategies to manage risks in some critical infrastructure sectors, few map interdependencies across sectors and only half have the capacity to identify new, unforeseen and complex crises (OECD, 2018).  The COVID-19 pandemic and climate crisis further underscore the need to address these shortcomings. The increasing frequency and scale of shocks calls for application of better risk analytics to guide and underpin national and sectoral plans, investments, and resilience building. 

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction stipulates that the global community must come to terms with a new understanding of the dynamic nature of systemic risks. New structures are needed to govern risk in complex, adaptive systems and new tools for risk-informed decision making are required. Only with such approaches can human societies flourish amid uncertainty. Coming to terms with the limitations of a hazard-by-hazard view of risk management, the Sendai Framework encourages dialogue and action to refine, extend and enhance our ability to understand and manage systemic risks.  

Member States, the UN system, and partners need to be better equipped to undertake multi-hazard and multi-sectoral risk assessments. More cross-sectoral collaboration is needed in order to move beyond linear risk analysis. Interconnected and systemic risk requires informed multi-stakeholder action.

Session guiding questions 

• How can we transition from hazard-by-hazard risk assessments towards multi-hazard and multi-sectoral risk assessments? 
• What lessons, good practices and use-cases can be distilled from emerging practices, and what approaches can be pointed to that have been effective in reducing aggregate risk and barriers across sectors? 
• What does this transition to assessing multi-hazard, multi-sectoral and inter-connected risk mean for communities of practice in terms of building the state-of-the-art, ensuring the fitness of analytic tools and approaches, improving risk data and information ecosystems, and broader risk governance across institutions at multiple levels? 

Read this section to learn more about the topic of diversity in DRR leadership, ensuring you come prepared to the session. 

Where do we stand? 

Increasingly, there is recognition that diverse leadership is fundamental for challenging and addressing norms and discriminations that drive unequal disaster risk; and for ensuring more effective and resilient outcomes that leave no one behind. Yet significant barriers remain for women, persons with disabilities, youth, elderly, and other groups most at risk to take a transformative leadership role and meaningfully participate in disaster risk reduction recovery and resilience building. These barriers include: 

• Lack of targeted funding 
• Inadequate capacity development and challenges in accessing knowledge and skills for leadership 
• Insufficient coordination between representative organisations and DRR/climate change adaptation/resilience actors 
• Collective influencing and advocacy power of national and local groups to ensure DRR/resilience processes are influenced by their priorities, needs and capacities. 

At the same time, there are opportunities, which could accelerate diverse leadership in DRR and resilience building and fast-track gender-responsive and inclusive implementation of the Sendai Framework. These opportunities include 

• Building awareness of the rationale for diverse leadership in DRR and how diversity in decision-making can reduce disaster risk for all 
• Identifying the enablers of change to overcome key barriers to diverse leadership 
• Disseminating and applying existing tools to measure and accelerate progress 
• Securing commitments to move beyond box ticking to systemic inclusion of diversity 
• Identifying priority actions for different stakeholder groups. 

Session guiding questions 

• How can diverse leadership drive progress in achieving the implementation of the Sendai Framework? 
• What are the primary enablers to diverse and transformative leadership in DRR and resilience building?  

For more information: 

Women's Leadership
Women’s resilience to disasters
1 Million Youth Actions Challenge
The 1 Million Youth Actions Challenge- Video 

Join this session to learn more about decision-making and investments related to resilient infrastructure. 

Where do we stand? 

Key challenges in integrating resilience in infrastructure planning and management include: 

• Lack of agreed upon terminology and resilience metrics 
• Insufficient investment in prevention and resilience 
• Regulatory frameworks do not take full account of risks and vulnerability and do not include resilience measures 

At the same time, there are opportunities which could put us on the path to sustainability and resilience. These include: 

• Establishing overarching benchmarks for resilient infrastructure 
• Include infrastructure resilience in national DRR strategies and develop/update national and local regulations around infrastructure so that resilience measures are taken into consideration 
• Promote a ‘Think Resilience’ approach to all infrastructure investments, creating an enabling policy and investment environment for the integration of resilience into infrastructure development 
• Urge international financial institutions and development banks, as well as national financial institutions, to align their strategies, operations and activities with the 2030 initiatives. 

Session guiding questions 

• What do we understand by “resilient” infrastructure and what should some basic metrics of resilience look like? 
• What are some good examples of national DRR strategies incorporating infrastructure resilience and in what ways? 
• What tools and collaborations would best address the critical infrastructure damage and basic service disruption data gap in relation to SF Target D? 
• What regulatory and policy changes would bring the most dividends to communities and would ensure the resilience of infrastructure? 
• What kind of incentives could governments provide to private sectors to invest in resilience of infrastructure?  
• What are some of the bottlenecks for increasing investment in resilient infrastructure? 
• What measures and tools should we use to ensure that those investments are risk informed? 

Read this section to learn more about the potential of cross border cooperation for strengthened DRR capacity and action to ensure you come prepared to the session. 

Where do we stand? 

Challenges 

A mere 0.5% of the total amount of official development assistance between 2010 and 2019 was allocated to DRR. Moreover, only $5.5 billion was aimed at ex-ante risk reduction measures, compared to $119.8 billion spent on post-disaster response and recovery. Very few national development cooperation policies include disaster risk reduction. International development cooperation must become more risk-informed, given the increasingly complex risk landscape and the scope of resources and expertise required. A much broader range of experts and stakeholders must be engaged in cross-border collaboration for DRR. 

Opportunities 

Development cooperation can be a catalyst for disaster risk-informed domestic public and private investment as well as foreign direct investment. Yet traditional development partners cannot meet the scale of investment needed for DRR alone. COVID-19 recovery packages as well as C0P 26 commitments to increase financing for climate change adaptation provide opportunities to increase cross border collaboration for DRR. Moreover, the wealth of knowledge and expertise within civil society organizations, and academic, research and scientific institutions, in both developed and developing countries can be leveraged to strengthen cross-border cooperation and capacity support for DRR. 

Cross-border cooperation between such organizations and actors: 

• supports the exchange of risk data and science and technology for disaster risk reduction 
• allows for more systemic and regular sharing of expertise, best practices and lessons learnt 
• promotes coherence and synergies between their work 
• supports cost-sharing for a more effective use of both financial and human resources more efficiently. 

Session guiding questions 

• How can DRR be better integrated into international development cooperation across all sectors? 
• What kind of approaches to cross-border disaster risk governance and cooperation have been most effective, including across shared ecosystems, water resources, and infrastructure assets?  
• What opportunities exist to better integrate academic, research, and science and technology institutions into cross-border cooperation for risk reduction? What types of policies, mechanisms and networks are needed? 
• To what extent are South-South and triangular cooperation being sufficiently leveraged as means of implementation? 

Read this section to learn more about the topic of local financing for climate and disaster resilience, ensuring you come prepared to the session. 

Where do we stand? 

Investing in disaster risk reduction is a precondition for developing sustainably. Given the differentiated impact of disasters on women, children and other groups, an investment in gender, age and disability-responsive disaster risk reduction is needed. Studies indicate Benefit to Cost Ratios (BCRs) that range between $1.7 and $150 of benefit for every $1 spent on programming for women and girls. Also, with much of the socio-economic, infrastructural, and other development likely to take place in urban centers, there is a need to augment local financing for resilience. The climate finance flows for cities reached an estimated USD384 billion annual on average in 2017/2018. This is far less than existing needs, estimated at USD4.5 to 5.4 trillion annually. 

At the same time, many grassroots groups have developed new financial mechanisms to help increase pre-disaster investments.  For example, the Community Resilience Fund (CRF) is a flexible financial mechanism that puts money at the hands of grassroots communities to develop risk-informed planning and actions, builds partnership with the local government and drives locally-led implementation. The municipality of Livingston, Izabal in Guatemala, agreed to finance actions aimed at community resilience, which are implemented by local leaders. The Municipality of Wiwili in Nicaragua, agreed to allocate a municipal fund of 10% for disaster risk reduction projects at the grassroots level, specifically targeting women's organizations.  
But while successful examples exist, the question remains: “How can these examples be scaled up to achieve results across communities and continents?” 

Session guiding questions 

• How can local governments and communities work together for better access to financing that empowers the most vulnerable in decision making?  
• How can civil society and women’s organizations influence financing decisions and policy making?  
• What are the emerging trends for increasing the financing at the local level?  
• At global, national, and community levels, what actions are needed to accelerate progress to strengthen capabilities and capacities of local governments to better prepare DRR/resilience project portfolios? 

Join the session to learn more about the latest discussions around Early Warning Systems including Early Action. 

Where do we stand 

Since 2006, the Early Warning System Checklist serves as a fundamental concept in early warning systems. It enhanced the understanding of early warning as a people-centered system with four key components (risk knowledge, monitoring and forecasting, dissemination and communication, and response capability).  

While the international community has recognized the importance of early warning systems and significant progress has been achieved at regional, national and local level, challenges still remain, including: 

• Increasing frequency and intensity of climatic events; 
• Increasing population dynamics in hazardous zones; 
• Slow and rapid onset pandemic; 
• Conflicts posing new risks to people, livelihoods, infrastructure and services; 
• Regional and global interconnectedness allowing propagation of risk and impacts across borders and systems; 
• Digital inequalities causing a lack of access of marginalized groups to EW information; 
• Need of improvement of multi-sector effective governance and financing mechanisms. 

At the same time, the EW/EA offers key opportunities to maximize DRR implementation: 

• Contributing to more precise and accessible warnings which provide actionable information for people and organizations alike; 
• Enhanced effectiveness of preparedness to disasters; 
• Strengthened people-centred inclusive approaches to multi-hazards; 
• Progress made in terms of information and communication technology access and use; 
• Increase in science, technology, climate and disaster risk data availability as well as forecasting and predictive modelling capacities. 

Session guiding questions 

• What is the role of EW/EA in averting, minimizing and addressing risks, losses and damages? 
• What are the current opportunities and challenges to enhance effective and inclusive governance and financing of EWS? 
• How can we trace the evolution of methodologies and tools to design and implement multi-hazard and risk-centered EWS that enable early action across scales? 
• What is the wider application of EWEA to help reduce vulnerabilities to climate and disaster risk and reduce the impact of disasters on inequalities?