The Sendai Framework

SFDRR was adopted at the Third UN World Conference in Sendai, Japan, on March 18, 2015. The framework aims to achieve the substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health and in the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assets of persons, businesses, communities and countries over the 15 years leading to 2030. More information on the Sendai Framework is available here.

The framework sets four priorities for action and seven global targets to reduce the risk of disasters and to avoid the increase in the level of existing risks. The seven targets are assessed through a set of 38 indicators.  Government officials and relevant stakeholders involved in monitoring national progress have been designated to report on in the SFM, to support the assessment of global progress in the reduction of risk and losses. Country coordinators also have the option to add custom indicators and targets, which are nationally defined instruments to measure the implementation of the Sendai Priorities, to support states in reporting the relevant data they have.

SFDRR Sub-indicator C-2Fo/C-2Foa of Target C

Target C of the SFDRR has been incorporated to reduce direct disaster economic loss in relation to global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. It refers to economic losses to the agricultural sector, productive assets, housing sector, critical infrastructure, and culturage heritage. 

Indicator C-2 measures the impact of disasters on agricultural production and assets. As agriculture is understood to include the crops, livestock, fisheries, apiculture, aquaculture and forest sectors as well as associated facilities and infrastructure, C-2 is the sum of five sub-indicators. Sub-indicator C-2Fo measures loss in forests damaged or destroyed by disasters.

Full reporting for the Target C indicators would require data collected from different government ministries, agencies, and/or other relevant stakeholders such as Non-governmental ogranisations (NGOs). It is likely that the ministry/agency responsible for national forest management would be responsible for collecting the data that states need to report on sub-indicator C-2Fo.

However, reporting country data on economic loss in forest damaged or destroyed by disasters may not be feasible, especially in developing countries which experience frequent forest fires over large areas. This was highlighted in the Sendai Framework Data Readiness Review conducted in 2017, in which 87 countries participated, which found that no single country has all the data required to report on all the targets, and that datasets on economic losses are less available than physical damage and human impact indicators. In countries where there is no methodology to assess economic loss of forests, the TGN therefore specifies that a physical damage indicator, C-2FOa, which measures the number of hectares of forests damaged/destroyed by disasters (disagregated by hazard) will be accepted in lieu of the corresponding estimated economic loss.

In Detail: acccesing data for C-2Fo (Fires)

1. Go to GWIS using the following URL: https://gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu, and go to Country Profiles under Apps in the main navigation panel.

2. In the left side navigation panel in Country Profiles, click on Country Charts. Select Zone (e.g. South America) from the drop-down list, and scroll to your country of interest. Under the ‘Period’ filter, toggle the slider to start from 2002 to 2005. Click ‘Update’.

3. Scroll to the graph titled ‘Yearly Burned Area by Landcover – [2005-2019]’. Hover over the download icon, and download the data as CSV. 

4. Double click the download to open it in Excel. The file name will start with ‘MCD64.006’, refering to the MODIS Collection 6 burned area product MCD64 A1 from which burnt area statistics are computed. The product employs a combination of daily 500m MODIS surface reflectance and 1km MODIS active fire observations, and applies dynamic thresholds to composite Terra and Aqua imagery generated from a burn-sensitive vegetation index from MODIS 1240 and 2130 nm bands and a measure of temporal variability (GWIS, 2021). The algorithms’ coupled use of active-fire and reflectance data enables it to adapt regionally and over varied ecosystems, and peforms substantially better in reducing the number of unclassified grid cells due to  cloud contaminated observations compared to the heritage Collection 5.1 MODIS products (Giglio et al, 2018). 

The values corresponding to the total burnt area in hectares of forest for years 2015 onwards can be reported as physical damage indicators under sub-indicator C-2Fo. In the SFM, select data entry option ‘Enter hectares manually & monetary value to be calculated’, and the system will calculate an estimate of corresponding economic loss. To include grasslands in C-2Fo reporting, add the yearly values for burned grass/shrubland to those for forests.

5. Member states are encouraged to include baseline data for Target C for improved analysis of progress over time. To calculate the mean annual burned area for the period for 2005-2014 in Excel, use the AVERAGE function and select cells corresponding to yearly burned area before 2015.

To calculate percentage increase in any year relative to the baseline, subtract the baseline value from the number of hectares burned for any year, and divide by the baseline. Ensure the cell format is converted to ‘Percentage’. In the example below, we can see that Bolivia experienced a 70.2% increase in number of hectares forests damaged/destroyed by fires in 2019 compared to the 2005-2014 (pre-Sendai) baseline.