By: Staff Writer
November 28, 2024
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) said in a recent report that the LAC accounts for 53 percent of the world’s economic losses due to disasters, and six of the ten countries with the highest economic losses from disasters relative to GDP are in the region.
The report, “Regional Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction in Latin America and the Caribbean,” also said: “The continuous increase in the type, number, impact, and recurrence of disasters and the risks preceding them has been the dominant trend for the past twenty years. As a result, the gap between losses and damages and the resources and capacities to address, reduce, and prevent them has widened, compromising development sustainability and significantly hindering the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals 2015-2030 (SDGs).
“The report Overview of Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNDRR & OCHA, 2023) shows that the region is the second most prone to disasters globally. Between 2000 and 2022, approximately 190 million people were affected by 1,534 disasters.”
The report also said: “Disasters disproportionately affect vulnerable and marginalized populations, with a significant impact on the poorest, most excluded, and marginalized individuals. This includes those experiencing intersecting vulnerabilities related to gender, disability, age, ethnicity, and race, among others.
“Climate threats are increasing, ranging from the most extreme to extensive and everyday events, and contexts of multi-hazard and complex threats lead to increasingly challenging scenarios of risk and disaster.”
To reverse this trend, the report further noted that states must strengthen both the identification of gaps in DRR that are inclusive of “dedicated budgets and their incorporation into national financial frameworks and strategies.” The UNDRR claims that this involves implementing innovative mechanisms, instruments, and tools for financing DRR as an integral part of sustainable development investments.
The report added: “Fostering direct and indirect public and private riskinformed investments is key to ensuring that current investments do not finance future disasters. This requires public policies, strategies, and development plans to consider risk as a systemic public issue that limits development sustainability and demands comprehensive, inclusive, sectoral, and territorial solutions that enhance intervention in underlying risk factors and drivers, promoting an appropriate governance framework.”
It also said: “It is also important to incorporate DRR elements into compensatory management. For example, Early Warning Systems (EWS), as long as they are multihazard, people-centered, and operate end-to-end, can activate early action in response to residual risk, which reduces losses and damages to people, assets, and livelihoods while enhancing resilience to future risks. Framing compensatory management with prospective approaches can provide valuable information and stimulate ideas for effectively reducing current risk and avoiding future risk. Combined with actions to Build Back Better (BBB), compensatory management can be a strong ally in structural DRR and in achieving the humanitarian development nexus.”