Official Statement of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia, Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (GPDRR 2022)

Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen, 

It is an honor for me to participate in the Seventh Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction. First and foremost, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Government of Indonesia for the hospitality accorded to the Ethiopian delegation since our arrival and for the orientation session organized at its Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia ahead of the platform. I wish also to thank the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction for organizing and convening this Platform and for facilitating our participation.    

The government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia would like to associate itself to the Official Statements of the African Union Commission and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development delivered at this Platform. And more importantly, my government will remain committed to translating the Africa Common Position to the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction 2022.   

The first step taken by the government towards delivering its commitment to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Program of Action for its implementation in Africa was aligning the National Policy and Strategy on Disaster Risk Management with these two global and continental frameworks.  

Guided by its revised National Policy and Strategy on Disaster Risk Management, Ethiopia has made a lot of progress in advancing the disaster risk reduction agenda for resilience, which is also central to our Ten Years Development Plan (2021-2030). Integration of disaster risk reduction and management and climate resilience into our Ten Years Development Plan has laid a solid foundation for us to ensuring coherence across sustainable development, climate change and DRR/DRM actions, besides facilitating a coherent, integrated and coordinated approach towards building disaster and climate resilience in the country-one of the priorities of the government to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, and Ethiopia’s vision through effective implementation of the Ten Years Development Plan in general and the National Policy and Strategy on Disaster Risk Reduction in particular.   

Ethiopia has also registered significant progress in improving the availability and access to climate and disaster risk information for risk-informed development and investment through its disaster risk profiling program. We have also taken a range of steps to strengthen partnerships with our strategic partners, legal and institutional frameworks and multi sectoral coordination mechanisms for DRR/DRM, as well as multi-hazard early warning systems for early action, including through enhancing capacity for forest fire monitoring and early warning with support from UNDRR and its technical-scientific partner-the CIMA Research Foundation-under the project funded by the Italian Government. Another significant milestone worth noting is that the progress we have made in reducing natural disaster-related mortality and economic losses. Ethiopia is also a country who continues championing of strengthening the humanitarian-development nexus as key undertaking to building climate and disaster resilience, thereby achieving sustainable development.  

All these and the results of our assessment of progress in the implementation of the National Policy and Strategy on DRM so far point to the fact that, overall, Ethiopia is on track to achieving the goals of the Sendai Framework and the Program of Action for its implementation in Africa as well as the IGAD DRM Program. This has become more apparent when we embarked on the midterm review of the implementation of the Sendai Framework in Ethiopia. 

We are grateful to the European Union, USAID, the World Bank Group, UNDRR and other UN entities, the CIMA Research Foundation, the Building Resilience in Ethiopia (BRE) project, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, and all other development partners for their continued support in this regard and to advance the disaster risk reduction agenda across the country within the framework of our national DRR/DRM Policy and Strategy aligned to the Sendai Framework, the Africa Program of Action, and the IGAD DRM Program.  

Despite the above achievements, the government recognizes the importance of stepping up efforts to accelerate progress towards full achievement of the outcomes, goals, and targets of the above mentioned global and continental disaster risk reduction frameworks.  

More specifically, progress in reducing the number of people affected by natural disasters has been relatively slow mainly due to climate related extreme events such as droughts and floods, which continue to increase both in frequency and magnitude. The drought which significantly affected some parts of the country is a testimony to that and is the reason why the Government continues to put building climate and disaster resilience at the top of its development agenda. In like all other countries in the world, Ethiopia has been grappling with the outbreak of COVID-19. We also recognize that the progress in ensuring linkages and coherence between the National Policy and Strategy on DRM, the National Adaptation Plan, Nationally Determined Contributions, and National Development Plan has been slow. In addition, while we have made encouraging progress in building and sustaining partnership with strategic partners, there is still a lot of work to do when it comes to strengthening international cooperation to developing countries like Ethiopia to implement DRR/DRM strategies.  

Capacity development, including for risk-informed recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact, provision of technical guidance, tools, and methodologies, and facilitating knowledge sharing in the area of risk knowledge, multi-hazard early warning systems and early action, disaster risk governance, enhancing international cooperation and partnerships, among others are critical for to addressing these gaps, and thus advancing progress.  

In this regard, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia will remain committed to ensuring full implementation of its National DRM Policy and Strategy, the Nairobi Declaration on accelerating the path to achieving the goal and targets of the Program of Action for the Implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 in Africa adopted at the 8th Africa Regional Platform and 7th High-Level Meeting on DRR held in November 2021 in Nairobi, Kenya, as well as the outcome of the Global Platform for DRR 2022 in general and the Africa Common Position presented to this platform in particular. The government is also committed to finalize its midterm review of the Sendai Framework implementation by the deadline.  

We look forward to strengthening partnerships and collaboration with our strategic partners, including the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the African Union Commission, and IGAD to support efforts aimed at building climate and disaster resilience for sustainable development in a COVID-19 transformed world. 

I thank you for your attention.