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 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 the topic of current data challenges and identify possible solutions. 

Where do we stand 

Urgent efforts to scale-up the collection, analysis and reporting of disaster-related statistics are key to achieve the Sendai Framework, and hence SDG targets, by 2030. 

The 7 targets and 38 indicators of the Sendai Framework lay out an ambitious agenda to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risk. However, achieving these goals is not the only challenge. Monitoring progress towards the Sendai Framework Targets represents an arduous yet crucial task for national statistical systems. While the past seven years have seen a substantial increase in reporting rates – a total of 153 countries are now reporting across different Sendai targets – significant data gaps prevail.   

The under-representation of disaster impact – especially that of extensive disasters – and issues of data generation, incomplete records, lack of disaggregation and granularity, etc. are hampering our understanding of the full impact of disasters across time, geographies and sectors.  

Effective disaster risk reduction policy and action requires functioning disaster loss and risk information systems that can provide reliable and timely data, statistics and analysis. This is a key enabling condition for countries to develop and implement DRR strategies and investment that are tailored to specific risk contexts, vulnerabilities, impacts and needs. 

Therefore, coordinated global, national and local efforts to strengthen data generation and statistical capacities for disaster impact and risk analysis must be scaled-up. This would allow for a sound evidence base to be used in DRR and climate change decision making, policy, planning and investment. It will also contribute to greater coherence and synergies from holistic information management across UN instruments, including the 2030 Agenda, the Paris Agreement and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. 

Key guiding questions are: 

• How can we meet the growing demands for disaster-related statistics, while coping with the resulting complexity? 
• How can global, regional, national and local-level actions be scaled up to produce and use more timely, accurate, disaggregated and granular DRR data? 
• How can we ensure accessibility of DRR data?  
• How can we strengthen evidence-informed and data-backed decision making for DRR and climate change policy and action, including through coordination among stakeholders? 
• How can we scale up the data revolution for DRR and climate action, including through new technologies and innovations?

What do you need to know about disaster displacement and the links between climate change, disaster risk reduction, data and governance in advance of this session? 

Where do we stand? 

The exposure and vulnerability of persons to disaster displacement is multicausal and driven by political, social and economic factors, among others, and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. To avoid the negative impacts of disaster displacement, risk governance must be strengthened. It needs to be evidence-based and place at-risk or affected communities at the center of action; this includes displaced people and communities in their areas of return, refuge or alternative settlement. It needs to draw on Human Rights standards, and existing guidance such as the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and Durable Solutions Frameworks.  

Effective and comprehensive responses to the risks of disaster displacement are required at all levels, but challenges include: 

• Weak or insufficient governance; 
• Gaps in data and evidence and barriers to its effective use to inform governance; 
• Coordination challenges to the integrated implementation of DRR with other policy areas such as human rights, humanitarian action, sustainable development, climate action and human mobility; 
• Insufficient capacity at all levels to address disaster displacement coherently. 

However, there are tools and existing effective practices to take guidance and learn from, which include: 

• The Words into Action Guidelines, Checklist and eLearning; 
• International standards and guidance on displacement of relevance for human mobility and DRR; 
• Experiences and learnings from the local, national and regional levels where specific stakeholders’ commitments will be presented at this event. 

Session guiding questions 

• In what ways can data strengthen governance, and what are the key challenges? 
• Why is it important to ensure coherence between DRR and other policy areas? 
• How can the Words into Action Guidelines, Checklist and eLearning support the inclusion of disaster displacement into DRR strategies and policies? 
• How can we ensure meaningful and inclusive participation of those affected by, or at risk of displacement, in data collection and governance? 

Read more on risk-informed investments and why they are important to reduce disaster risk.  

Where do we stand?  

Investing in disaster risk reduction (DRR) is a precondition for developing sustainably in a rapidly changing climate. DRR investments can be achieved and make good financial sense. Yet, they are not carried out to the extent required. Public and private investment decisions typically: 

• Don’t consider how an investment may be creating disaster risk in terms of exposure and vulnerability at multiple levels, including national, local, and landscape. 
• Don’t include costs of disasters and benefits of risk mitigation in financial modeling and on balance sheets. Thus, such costs and benefits remain either external to, or are undisclosed in, private and financial sector investment decision-making. 
• Treat disaster and climate risks as temporally remote, limited, uncertain, and/or unquantifiable at the level of an individual project and, thus, externalize them. 

Though action is lagging, the combined effect of COVID-19 and increasing disaster risk from the climate emergency, provide todays leaders, investors, and decision makers with a unique opportunity to invest in public and private funds in a resilient way for a green, sustainable future. 

To this end, governments should endeavor to make all financial investments resilient to disasters and to ensure that they do not create new risks. At the same time, the private and financial sector also need to lead and foster risk-informed business behaviors that include reporting and disclosure of material, long-term sustainability risks, as well as impact reporting on how companies are contributing to resilience aligned with the Sendai Framework, Paris Climate Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals.

Session guiding questions  

• How can disaster and climate risk reduction measures be better embedded into public and private investments? 
• What are key obstacles/barriers to reducing disaster risk in public and private investments and how can they be overcome? 
• What are examples of policies, programs, measures that resulted in investments that have successfully integrated risk reduction measures? 
• What was your/your institutions’ decision-making process that led to a risk-informed investment? Provide examples of the competencies, capacities and tipping-points that catalyzed and led to action.  
• How can different stakeholders (regulators, private investors, policy makers, civil society, academia, intergovernmental organizations, etc.) catalyze action to better align public and private investment strategies, operations and activities with the Sendai Framework? 
• What are the unique challenges of LDCs and SIDS in embedding disaster and climate risk in public and private investments and how can these be addressed?