Progress report for
Building Capacities for Increased Public Investment in Integrated Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction
Achievement at a glance
National:▫ better understand losses and impact trends from disaster events and are empowered to identify the causal factors (within development processes) that are driving such trends;
▫ have an improved understanding of the importance of prospective approaches and the benefits in the long term of integrating risk reduction within planning and investment;
▫ are equipped with both empirical and prospective elements to support decision making can better identify the strategy and resources required to manage disasters.
Global:
▫ understanding of disaster risk trends continues to be enhanced and has informed Member States’ deliberations on the 2030 Agenda, the Sendai Framework and the Paris Agreement, contributing to the centrality of understanding risk and promoting resilience in sustainable development post-2015.
Challenges faced in implementation
▫ Turnover of partners and participants in the different components of the project threatens continuity and sustainability.▫ Access to, and participation of, all key stakeholders and decision-makers has not always been uniform, nor observed as standard. This has undermined the promotion of interlinkages between components – which is crucial to maximizing impact of the partnership.
▫ The information required to develop or improve delivery of each component was not consistently available.
Next Steps
▫ The multi-hazard, probabilistic global disaster risk model developed by UNISDR and partners will be developed further, in part so as to generate some of the risk metrics that will be required to monitor the achievement of the Sendai Framework goal, and thus the SDGs (see the report of the IAEG-SDGs endorsed by States at the 47th Session of the UN Statistical Commission).▫ Continued support to the strengthening of national capabilities to generate the data and develop disaster loss databases, to be able to report back on progress in implementing the Sendai Framework and the SDGs.
▫ Strengthening the interlinkages between components in supporting the implementation of the Sendai Framework and related Targets of the SDGS.
Beneficiaries
National Partners: Financing, planning, infrastructure ministries, departments and other governmental, multilateral and non-governmental agencies related to disaster risk management Technical partners: Component 1: disaster loss data collectors (governments including disaster risk management officials, researchers, environment and IT specialists). Component 2: experts in technical/scientific institutions, public or government, local universities. Component 3: specialists with knowledge in economics, public finance and public policy; and Ministry of Finance or Planning. Other beneficiaries: Reinsurance and risk modelling industries.
Actions
Disaster Loss Databases built for the SIDS included in the initiative have already provided evidence-based understanding of the true extent of damages and losses in the region, identifying specific hazards and providing a new view on the magnitude of Extensive Risk losses; an understanding of the latter is often underestimated or omitted in many risk assessments.The multi-hazard, probabilistic global disaster risk model developed by UNISDR has for the first time provided many of these countries with rough but realistic measures of catastrophic risk (such as Average Annual Loss and Probable Maximum Loss). Such data can be the basis for the design and development of risk financing, risk reduction and risk retention mechanisms, and associated decision making. Public and private partners, including leading companies in the reinsurance and risk modeling industry, have recognized the value of these country profiles as a new standard, given that risk has been calculated in all territories and for all hazards using the same arithmetic.
A number of Policy dialogues undertaken in a number of countries have directly or indirectly contributed to substantial increases in Risk Reduction budgets (e.g. Comoros), or the creation of risk transfer facilities (e.g. the Indian Ocean Commission countries). Best practices such as systematic budget reviews and tracking, cost benefit analysis for investment decisions and the introduction of considerations of risk and hazards are being now considered by governments in their public investment systems.