The World Disaster

[Jacqualine Henington]

EMDAT defines disasters as situations or events which overwhelm local capacity, necessitating a request for external assistance at the national or international level. Disasters are unforeseen and often sudden events that cause significant damage, destruction, and human suffering.

The main objective of the database is to serve the purposes of humanitarian action at national and international levels. The initiative aims to rationalize decision-making for disaster preparedness and disaster risk reduction strategies, as well as provide an objective base for vulnerability assessment and priority setting.

The database classifies disasters into two groups of hazards: natural and technological. The natural group is further classified up to four additional levels following the 2014 IRDR Peril Classification and Hazard Glossary. The technological group is less detailed and comprises three main types: transport, industrial, and miscellaneous accidents.

To change course, new approaches are needed. This will require transformations in what governance systems value and how systemic risk is understood and addressed. Doing more of the same will not be enough.

Risk creation is outstripping risk reduction. Disasters, economic loss and the underlying vulnerabilities that drive risk, such as poverty and inequality, are increasing just as ecosystems and biospheres are at risk of collapse. Global systems are becoming more connected and therefore more vulnerable in an uncertain risk landscape. COVID-19 spread quickly and relentlessly into every corner of the world, and global risks like climate change are having major impacts in every locality. Indirect, cascading impacts can be significant.

Investment in understanding risk is the foundation for sustainable development. However, this needs to link to a reworking of financial and governance systems to account for the real costs of current inaction to address risks like climate change. Without this, financial balance sheets and governance decision-making will remain fragmented and be rendered increasingly inaccurate and ineffective.

The report offers valuable recommendations to reduce risk and increase resilience. It also details how innovations in systemic risk modelling offer a promising mechanism to better anticipate and respond to risk.

Human action is creating greater and more dangerous risk, and pushing the planet towards existential and ecosystem limits. Risk reduction needs to be at the core of action to accelerate climate change action and achieve the SDGs.

The number of extreme temperature events per year is also increasing, and based on current trends will almost triple between 2001 and 2030. Disasters have negative impacts on biodiversity and environmental sustainability.

Systemic risk cannot be eliminated entirely, but it can be reduced and addressed more effectively. Addressing systemic risk requires building on existing risk reduction know-how, and also developing enhanced approaches to address the characteristics of systemic risk such as its cascading effects and inherent complexity and uncertainty.

The costs of disasters are felt across almost all areas of sustainable development. As the world urbanizes, risk is being concentrated in densely populated areas, many of which are not designed to withstand their current levels of hazard exposure, let alone those anticipated as a result of climate change.

In the face of global systemic risk, governance systems must quickly evolve and recognize that the challenges for the economy, environment and equality can no longer be separated. Conventional approaches to risk governance have tended to be based on linear or well- established cause-and-effect relationships. By contrast, systemic risk governance needs to recognize complex causal structures, dynamic evolutions and cascading or compound impacts. The recommendations of GAR2022 take the form of a call to action.

The world is not on track to reduce risk. The costs of disasters are increasing in both social and economic terms, threatening sustainable development (GAR2022, Chapters 2 and 3). Balance sheets ignore key variables, particularly undervaluing climate change risk, costs to ecosystems and the positive social benefits of risk reduction. The real costs of extensive risk are especially undervalued, and this gap is widening as major climate change impacts such as sea-level rise gather pace. To help measure what we value, key actions are to:

Governments and the financial industry urgently need to improve how they account for the extent of financial assets at risk under various future climate change scenarios. Social and environmental impact assessments undertaken during the initiation of projects need to be extended to include regular reporting by the public sector, major companies, investments and pension funds. Risk myopia means there are few safe options offered for risk-resilient investments. Just as green bonds helped accelerate the finance of renewable energy, similar financial products are needed to incentivize and ease investment that is resilient to disaster risk and climate change.

Policymakers and providers of disaster risk reduction products and services to households and communities continue to undervalue how risk perceptions, including cognitive biases, influence decision-making. To help design systems that factor in how human minds make decisions about risk, key actions are to:

Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic show that the success rates of models were uneven in predicting the spread of the disease within and among countries. Decision makers went from an over-reliance on models to extreme scepticism about their utility. Modelling tools can help people think about things in a better way, but they cannot predict the future with granular accuracy. No models are 100% reliable. However, they are essential tools as long as the people who interpret them do not have unrealistic expectations of their omnipotence or dismiss them. Governments can, and should, invest in data analytics, but only if quality models and big data use are combined with methods to draw on local knowledge, community feedback and expert opinion.

Governance and financial systems are not yet embracing transdisciplinary approaches and tend to take top-down approaches. To help reconfigure governance and financial systems to work across silos, and design in consultation with affected people, key actions are to:

Disaster risk management actors and other sectors speak differently about risk and too often operate in sectoral silos. There is a need to look more at systems, not individual hazards, and to work across disciplines. This requires increased efforts to create common terminologies and provide open access data across disciplines to create shared knowledge, encourage lateral collaboration and speed up the pace of learning. Disaster risk modellers have been learning from tools developed to measure cascading effects during the last financial crisis and from enterprise risk management approaches.

At the global level, initiatives such as the UNDRR and International Science Council joint Hazard Definition and Classification Review, the new Centre of Excellence for Climate and Disaster Resilience established by UNDRR and the World Meteorological Organization (GAR2022, Chapter 1) and similar inter-agency collaborations that upgrade disaster damage and loss reporting are helping to increase the interoperability and utility of data systems. Such efforts need to be supported to enable enhanced risk understanding at a global level.

Modern technology provides opportunities to accelerate learning and to quickly pick up signals essential for effective risk management in an uncertain future. But acting on these signals requires nuanced forms of communication with the public, and particularly better communication with higher-risk groups. Enhanced social protection systems targeted towards at-risk groups can be a good vehicle for better understanding who is most vulnerable to emerging risks and for ensuring effective anticipatory action to prevent acute humanitarian crises.

More emphasis is required in scenario planning to manage extensive disasters and to handle governance issues resulting from cascading impacts. For example, adjustments made to health systems based on local knowledge and feedback were essential to building trust during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia (GAR2022, Chapter 7). In Canada, an InterSectoral Flood Network of Quebec presents modelling data and also explicitly facilitates co-training among members to promote a vision that is systemic and intersectoral, engaging universities and various socioeconomic partners and disciplines (GAR2022, Chapter 10).

The keys to building resilience and accelerating sustainable development are measuring what we value, designing systems around the way people make decisions on risk, and reconfiguring governance and financial systems to work collaboratively and across silos. As climate change impacts gather pace, we know what is at stake for future generations.

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GAR2022 Slide deck English French

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The UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) is the flagship report of the United Nations on worldwide efforts to reduce disaster risk. The GAR is published biennially by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), and is the product of the contributions of nations, public and private disaster risk-related science and research, amongst others.

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