The 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR15), prepared by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) was launched yesterday. In his remarks at the launch of the report, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon underllined that “growing global inequality, increasing exposure to natural hazards, rapid urbanization and the overconsumption of energy and natural resources threaten to drive risk to dangerous and unpredictable levels with systemic global impacts.”
The report states that economic losses from disasters are now reaching an average of US$250 billion to US$300 billion annually. This number could be substantially decreased by spending more money on prevention and management, it says. GAR estimates that an investment of US$6 billion annually in disaster risk management would avoid losses of US$360 billion over the next 15 years.
In a press release, Margareta Wahlström, head of UNISDR, said: “The 2015 Global Assessment Report demonstrates clearly that many countries face significant challenges because of their inability to manage the fiscal burden created by large-scale disaster events.”
Another key finding is that the majority of governments are too focused on managing disasters rather than tackling the underlying drivers of disaster risk such as poverty, climate change, the decline of protective eco-systems, poor urban planning and land use, and lack of building codes which contribute significantly to the creation of risk.
GAR15, sub-titled “Making Development Sustainable: The Future of Disaster Risk Management”, provides a sober review of the ten years which have passed since the last World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Kobe, Japan and is a major contribution to the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) which is due to adopt a new global agreement on disaster risk reduction which will update the Hyogo Framework for Action.
