Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation: The Challenge and Opportunity

Last year, 321 natural disasters claimed more than 235,000 lives and cost the world an estimated $181 billion. Climate change could compound the risk for natural disasters, but it also provides an opportunity to support and empower poorer communities to manage that risk. Today, in honor of the International Day of Disaster Reduction, the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the Bank’s Disaster Risk Management team analyze the critical relationship between natural disasters and climate change.Â

October 14, 2009 - International Day for Disaster Reduction

In July and August, several West African countries were just starting to assess the damages from severe floods that struck the region. A month later, and over the past few weeks, many Asian countries (e.g. Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal, India, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Samoa, Tonga and Bhutan) also came face-to-face with disaster, struggling to overcome the floods, cyclones, and earthquakes wreaked by a devastating tsunami. In India alone, floods in southern and western states left more than 2.5 million people homeless and caused losses estimated at $6.7 billion.

The world is constantly being ravaged by the unpredictable outcomes of nature's fury. Changing climatic conditions continue to unfold disasters across the world...

In Manila, 240 people were killed by a typhoon that poured the equivalent of one month's rain in just 6 hours. Natural hazards are always with us, and their potential to become disasters is increasing, due to a number of factors, including climate change. Today, in honor of the International Day of Disaster Reduction, the Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the Bank’s Disaster Risk Management team analyze this critical relationship.

The Vulnerable Poor

Poor households manage a myriad of risks on a daily basis. These risks emanate from a great range of sources, including natural hazards, environmental degradation, social marginalization, conflict, and lack of access to information and services, among others. While the poor face higher levels of risk than wealthier households, they have significantly fewer assets to deal with shocks. Understanding what makes and keeps people vulnerable and what contributes to their resilience remains at the core towards achieving poverty reduction.

The World Bank's Disaster Risk Management team aims to reduce human suffering and economic losses caused by natural and technological disasters. Through the Bank’s regional teams, East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Africa, and Europe and Central Asia, and the support of GFDRR, the Bank provides a more strategic and rapid response to disasters and promotes the integration of disaster prevention and mitigation efforts into its range of development activities. Disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation is really about development effectiveness. It's about empowering people to understand that they can affect what happens to them and to act upon that knowledge to drive the course of their lives and the development of their communities.

While the poor have developed a range of innovative coping strategies to manage risk, the risk landscape is changing rapidly. Climate change, as well as other factors, is contributing to patterns that intensify, accumulate and compound risk. As different risks become more interdependent, this creates a much more complex and challenging environment for development agencies. In fact, institutional barriers for understanding and cooperation become irrelevant and even detrimental to providing effective support to poor communities in reducing risk and recovering from shocks. This highlights the urgent need for inter-disciplinary approaches to address the root causes of vulnerability.

Using Robust Tools to Manage the Risks and Impacts

Disaster risk management (DRM) is a crucial component of the climate change adaptation agenda. While several impacts of climate change are not known, or cannot be measured, the impacts on natural disasters are apparent. Climate change can increase the frequency and magnitude of natural disasters, and thus can lead to greater human and economic losses in already vulnerable countries.

Existing disaster risk management tools are currently the best available instruments for climate change adaptation decision making. The World Bank’s Latin America and Caribbean Regional DRM team applies these tools to assess multi-hazard risk, including climate risk, which allow decision makers to make sense of down-scaled global circulation models if they wish to understand the impacts of a changing climate on people and assets, which are naturally the main concern for most decision makers. The World Bank’s Disaster Risk Management community has spent decades making sense of nature’s uncertainties with a focus on impacts for people and assets.

Current DRM tools provide the required know-how for decision making and developing an action plan for increasing resilience in a robust way. Along with the inter-disciplinary approach, new ways of preventing the risk rather than reacting to the troubles that climate change and increasing disaster risk can lead to are also critical. The World Bank’s South Asia Regional DRM team is launching today a flagship program in risk management initiatives in Nepal, considered one of the most at-risk countries in the world. It entails a new disaster risk reduction program by a joint consortium between the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the UN Development Program. This initiative for Nepal seeks to make schools and hospitals safer through structural and non-structural measures; enhance emergency preparedness and response capacities to better prepare people to respond to disasters; improve flood management in the Koshi River Basin; integrate community-based disaster risk reduction efforts into disaster management; and increase policy and institutional support for disaster risk management.

The World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Regional DRM team, with support from the Bank’s GFDRR, has assisted Yemen in sustaining the dialogue for mainstreaming disaster risk management, which has resulted in the emergence of a high level of awareness on the importance of DRM or pre-disaster planning amongst policy-makers. This is an example of how the World Bank’s Disaster Risk Management efforts have also initiated a shift from an existing reactive approach towards a preventive approach for the management of disasters in many developing countries.

The Climate Resilient Cities Primer, which reflects cooperation between the World Bank’s East Asia Pacific Regional DRM team, GFDRR, and the UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, is a great innovation in this field as it adopts a multi-hazard lens and discusses the dual track approaches of mitigation and adaption that are essential for all cities. Moreover, its focus on the sub-national context and the rich lessons from regional and global cities employing sound practices is of tremendous value to city planners and policymakers in cities around the world.

Global Collaboration Leverages Synergies

The countries of South Eastern Europe face a common set of disaster risks: earthquakes, landslides, floods, drought and wildfires. Due to the size and location of the countries, and the cross-boundary nature of most disaster risks, effective disaster risk mitigation in the region requires not only national-level investments, but also regional interventions. The World Bank’s South Eastern Europe and Central Asia Regional DRM team, with grants provided by GFDRR to address DRM and climate change adaptation issues, has mobilized nearly US$60 million in World Bank funding for disaster risk mitigation projects in Albania, Croatia and Moldova, €7 million in funding for DRM projects from bilateral and other multilateral donor. By catalyzing joint DRM initiatives among countries in the region, it has also generated innovative approaches to DRM that are being replicated elsewhere.

In the case of West Africa, where countries are experiencing unprecedented floods due to this year’s El Niño effect, the World Bank’s African Regional DRM team, with support from GFDRR, is assisting African to overcome the destruction particularly brought up to their cities. Post-Disasters Needs Assessments are already being carried out in the Central African Republic and Senegal, and will soon start in Togo and Burkina Faso. In the case of Uganda, assistance is being provided to the government to for building up sufficient capacity to respond to anticipated floods later in the year. Recently, government officials at central and district level are participating in a disaster preparedness workshop that teaches a comprehensive method to measure the impact of a disaster on the economy, households and individuals.

Despite the challenge that climate change is amplifying risks, the global visibility of the climate change agenda provide an opportunity for CCA to become an amplifier of key messages and a mobilizing force of actors around the need to support and empower poor communities to better manage risk. Disaster risk management and risk reduction strategies were identified by the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the Bali Action Plan of 2007 as a key negotiation element for an agreement to be reached at the COP-15. Although there are many assumed synergies between disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, these are not yet in place and the competing issues covered in adaptation may delay or derail implementing critical action on the ground.

The GFDRR is committed to boost the synergies between disaster risk management and climate change adaptation and provide practical solutions for affecting change on the ground. This can only be possible through close and cooperative work with the Bank’s Disaster Risk Management Regional Coordinators who ultimately execute the operations, provide technical support to vulnerable countries, promote the capacity-building mechanisms, and establish partnerships with the international and scientific community working on disaster issues to ensure that disaster prevention and mitigation are integral parts of development. The GFDRR is also working with Bank colleagues in the Environment, Social Development, Human Development, Urban and other departments to develop a strategy and collaborative program to best complement other adaptation activities in the Bank in support of strengthening the adaptive capacity of the poor.

In a joint effort with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), the GFDRR is hosting the 2009 Stockholm Policy Forum on Climate Smart Disaster Risk Reduction on October 26 in Stockholm, Sweden, which will bring together country representatives, practitioners and experts from both the disaster risk management and climate change adaptation communities. The main objective from this gathering is for participants to determine what principles and support needs to be secured in the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-15), taking place in Copenhagen in December, and perhaps more importantly, identify promising practices and critical actions for post-Copenhagen implementation of adaptation efforts.

For more information, please visit: www.gfdrr.org