UN unveils seven years campaign to boost disaster risk management

The United Nations envoy dealing with disaster risk reduction has launched a new multi-year campaign that aims to reduce disaster losses, improve management of disaster risk, and save lives.

“Despite many successes there are still far too many lives being lost in predictable events because of failures to deploy early warning systems, learn lessons from past events and to grasp the growing threat of climate change and its impact on extreme weather events including storms, floods and drought,” said Robert Glasser, the UN Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The Sendai Seven campaign is an advocacy initiative to encourage implementation over the next seven years of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which was adopted by UN Member States in 2015 in the northern Japanese city after which it was named, and consists of seven targets and four priorities for action that aim for 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.

“Risk awareness among the general public is a vital theme running through this seven year campaign which is centred around the seven targets which UN Member States have agreed on. These include substantial reductions in loss of life, numbers of people affected, economic losses and damage to infrastructure,” explained Mr. Glasser.

“The Sendai Framework also has targets focussed on increasing national and local disaster risk reduction strategies by 2020, enhanced international cooperation to developing countries and increased availability of multi-hazard early warning systems,” he added.

Specifically, the Sendai Framework aims to:

Substantially reduce global disaster mortality by 2030, aiming to lower average per 100,000 global mortality rate in the decade 2020-2030 compared with the period 2005-2015;

Substantially reduce the number of affected people globally by 2030, aiming to lower average global figure per 100,000 in the decade 2020 -2030 compared to the period 2005-2015;

Reduce direct disaster economic loss in relation to global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030;

Substantially reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services, among them health and educational facilities, including through developing their resilience by 2030;

Substantially increase the number of countries with national and local disaster risk reduction strategies by 2020;

Substantially enhance international cooperation to developing countries through adequate and sustainable support to complement their national actions for implementation of this Framework by 2030; and

Substantially increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information and assessments to the people by 2030.