Read this section to learn more about the topic of financing for risk prevention, ensuring you come prepared to the session. 

Where do we stand? 

Key challenges include: 

• Unprecedented debt accumulation amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic  
• Vicious cycle of disaster-response-recover-repeat due to lack of ex ante investment in resilience 
• The true costs of climate change, crisis and disaster are not fully accounted for or known 
• Negative impacts are often disproportionately borne by marginalized groups as disasters impact people differently 

At the same time, risk prevention financing presents opportunities, notably: 

• Improving the effectiveness of risk prevention investments through better inclusiveness and access to funds at local and community level. 
• Better understanding of investment impacts through strengthened assessment and tracking of investments and accountability systems 
• Better use of climate risk and vulnerability assessments, as well as evidence and data of climate impacts, help demonstrate the need for early risk prevention measures as well as comprehensive insurance coverage 
• The possibility for international ratings agencies and major creditors to shift towards a sustainable business model by considering investments in risk prevention or adaptation.  

Session guiding questions 

• What challenges prevent investment in risk prevention both in public and private portfolios? How do investment challenges differ between national, local and community level?       
• What opportunities and good practices and mechanisms exist for making risk-informed investments?  Who are the emerging key players in this field?      
• What are the key steps for putting in place a common vision towards increasing risk prevention investments? 
• How can we ensure that investments in prevention support the and benefit the most vulnerable, including women?  

Read this section to learn more about the topic of COVID-19 lessons to ensure social and economic recovery for all. 

Where do we stand

Despite strong efforts to strengthen disaster risk governance systems over the years, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that significant challenges remain. These include: 

• Insufficient knowledge and integration mechanisms of the health and other sectors as part of the scope of disaster risk management  
• Lack of understanding of risk complexity and the effects of cascading socio-economic impacts on vulnerable populations 
• Absence of investment in prevention and preparedness actions as part of recovery efforts, notably those that would address social and economic drivers of inequality 

At the same time, there are opportunities. 

• Despite insufficient past coordination between the health and other sectors, there has been a recent increase in the establishment of policy frameworks and recognition to increase coordination between the heath and other sectors in response to COVID-19, particularly disaster managers that should be taken advantage of. 
• Recognition of the need for multi-hazard risk management for effective risk governance and evidence-based recovery.
• Recognition of the impact of disasters on the more vulnerable and of the need to adopt a whole of society and inclusive approach to disaster risk reduction and recovery from COVID-19.

Session guiding questions

• Considering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on different co-existing groups, sectors and systems, how can governments and stakeholders better identify and manage current and emerging systemic risks, including the climate crisis? 
• How can we address identified challenges and accelerate progress in managing the “new” and multiple types of hazards and disaster risks included in the Sendai Framework for DRR1?  
• What are the key elements identified from the pandemic experience that can help us strengthen disaster risk governance and build stronger and more forward-looking, innovative and transformative systems for managing all types of hazards and risks? 
• How can governments and stakeholders plan using the information on current and emerging systemic risks, including the climate crisis to better manage risks in the future? 

Read this section to learn more about Sendai Framework implementation, its progress and challenges, ensuring you come prepared to the session. 

Where do we stand  

The first seven years of Sendai Framework Implementation have seen increased efforts of countries and communities to reduce risk and protect hard-earned development gains. With 153 countries now reporting on at least one of seven Sendai Targets, new trends are emerging. Global disaster-related mortality is on a downward trajectory and has declined by 40% compared to the 2000s, bringing us closer to reaching Sendai Target A. In the meantime, there has been a 1.5-fold increase in the number of countries with national and/or local DRR strategies, reaching 120 in 2020 (Target E).  

Despite this progress, disaster risk is proliferating, pointing to an urgent need to significantly accelerate action to implement the Sendai Framework. At no other point in history has the world faced such an array of familiar and unfamiliar risks, interacting in a hyperconnected world and a precipitously changing landscape. Climate change is the defining crisis of our time and is happening quicker than anticipated. The ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have shown that disasters are not confined to one sector, one location or one community and can quickly escalate into global crises. 

To be effective, global, national and local DRR efforts must be grounded in a comprehensive understanding of the far-reaching impacts of disasters, threats, crises and climate change. Achievement of the Sendai Framework requires greater focus on managing disaster risk in all its dimensions (hazards, exposure and vulnerability) with a particular focus on addressing the drivers of risk (including poverty, inequality, structural discrimination, and social norms) alongside building the enabling environment for more inclusive decision making. Furthermore, managing risk in all its dimensions is also a critical means of achieving the ambitious goals and policy commitments of Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement.    

Session guiding questions  

Where do we stand on Sendai Framework implementation?  

• Are we on track to reach the expected outcomes, goals and targets by 2030? 
• What are key good practices, experience and learning at regional level?  
• What are we learning from recent global DRR policy stocktaking processes? 

How do we strengthen our understanding of risk?  

• How to strengthen the evidence base for DRR and incorporate risk analysis at all levels of policy, programming and action? 

How do we accelerate progress?  

• How to promote an effective enabling environment for comprehensive disaster risk management and achieving the Sendai Framework?  
• What is needed to hardwire disaster and climate risk into humanitarian and development policy and action in order to catalyse synergies across the post-2015 commitments? 

How do we work together?  

• How to strengthen international cooperation for disaster risk reduction that is multi-hazard, multi-disciplinary, multi-sector, and multi-stakeholder? 
• Way forward: what are the foremost priorities for action towards 2030? 

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? 

Read this section to learn more about recovery strategies that are resilient and inclusive and reduce risk and vulnerability to future shocks, ensuring you come prepared to the session. 

Where do we stand? 
Key challenges include: 

• Unprecedented debt accumulation amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic  
• Ongoing vicious cycle of disaster-response-recover-repeat due to lack of ex ante investment in resilience 
• Lack of risk-informed decision-making  
• Ongoing need to address the unequal distribution of impacts on countries and priority sectors 

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

• Identification of priority recovery actions which prevent the creation of new risks and reduce existing risks 
• Development of recovery strategies that are resilient and inclusive 
• Set out responsibilities and liabilities of national governments, financing bodies and the private sector, to manage the negative externalities arising from policy and investment decisions that are not risk-informed 
• Improve transparency in recovery spending and accountability of all involved stakeholders to ensure that recovery and stimulus packages are inclusive, and account for resilience 

Session guiding questions 

• What are some of the key enablers of resilient recovery?  
• Are there any applicable examples of good practices?  
• What is needed to ensure that public sector, civil society, and private sector investments in recovery are forward-looking and take into account resilience and future risks?  
• What actions can be taken to embed disaster risk reduction and resilience into national and local planning for recovery?  How do we ensure that the recovery actions are co-designed with the communities at risk? 
• What policies and incentives should be put in place to meaningfully engage the investment, banking, and insurance sectors and other important stakeholders in the private sector in financing recovery that builds resilience? 
• How can specific economic sectors be supported to better tackle future shocks?