This report from the International Science Council identifies achievements in disaster risk reduction (DRR) since 2015 under the Sendai Framework and highlights key implementation gaps. SEI’s senior research fellow Albert Salamanca co-authored the report.
The magnitude and impact of disasters on lives, livelihoods and ecosystems are on the rise, setting back hard-won development gains in many parts of the world. These impacts are reducing the ability of nations and communities to cope with future disruptions as new combinations of stressors, including changes in the climate, are occurring faster than projected. Natural and socio-natural hazards are interacting more frequently with technological and biological hazards, and the effects of environmental change is producing more complex risk patterns, including compounding and cascading impacts, creating the possibility of more disasters. These trends are exacerbating known risks, creating new ones or revealing submerged risks. Typically, traditional thinking places disaster risk reduction as an add-on to climate adaptation. However, successful adaptation – and many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – will be impossible to achieve without greater capabilities for disaster risk reduction being supported across multiple scales.
In short, risks are outpacing our capacity to anticipate, manage and reduce the impact of disasters as they cascade through people’s lives, livelihoods, built infrastructure, environments and socio-economic systems.
This report is a contribution on behalf of the Scientific and Technological Community Major Group to the Mid-Term Review of the Sendai Framework led by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
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