UN disaster forum to push for risk-cutting plans, finance

TEPIC, Mexico (Thomson Reuters Foundation): Hard on the heels of a drought-linked hunger crisis in Somalia, floods in Peru and Colombia, and Cyclone Debbie in Australia, governments will be tasked with formalising efforts to protect citizens from disasters, and working out how to cover the cost at a major UN conference in Cancun, Mexico, this month.

With natural disasters expected to increase as the planet warms, the gathering of more than 5,000 experts will provide a crucial check-up on how government strategies to reduce risk are shaping up ahead of a 2020 deadline to substantially increase the number of countries that have them in place.

“It is not about score-keeping, it’s not about naming and shaming,” said Jo Scheuer, director for climate change and disaster risk reduction with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

“We do not know how many countries have truly worked on their strategy for 2020 (so) being able to actually look at that and learn from that is extremely important,” he said.

Running from May 24-26, the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction is the first international summit since the 15-year Sendai Framework was hammered out in Japan in 2015, setting ambitious targets for governments to substantially cut deaths and economic losses from disasters by 2030.

The seven Sendai targets also include limiting damage to infrastructure and disruption to basic services such as health and education, and widening access to early warning systems and disaster-risk information.

In Cancun, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) will demonstrate an online monitoring tool that, from 2018, will enable countries to check their progress towards the targets, using indicators now being tested.

Meeting the Sendai goal of putting national and local disaster risk reduction (DRR) plans in place by 2020 will help reach the other targets, experts say.

“A lot of discussion will focus around how these DRR strategies can be designed in the most effective way, to make sure they are value for money, they are appropriate and target the most vulnerable,” said Lucy Pearson of the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction.

There is also a need to involve communities more in putting them together, she added.

Last year, India became one of the first countries to adopt a national disaster plan which incorporated the Sendai Framework priorities – covering disaster prevention, mitigation, response and recovery – and providing for better coordination among government agencies and departments.

While around 75 percent of countries have some form of disaster risk planning in place, governments need a single strategy to monitor progress and ensure they are on track to meet the Sendai targets, experts say.

Funding gaps

While the Cancun conference is likely to ram home that spending on DRR is insufficient, no major pledges of fresh money are expected.

But ways of using insurance to tackle funding gaps and engaging the private sector more effectively in building resilient infrastructure are expected to be laid out.

The UNDP’s Scheuer said he wanted to see a shift away from reliance on already stretched humanitarian budgets to fund disaster prevention measures, towards using development aid for risk management and resilience-building.

“Many countries have already increased the amount of money for disaster risk reduction, but I think this meeting is about prioritising where these funds should be put,” said Ciro Ugarte, director of health emergencies at the Pan American Health Organization, emphasising the need to protect hospitals and schools.

The United Nations has called on governments to spend at least 1 percent of development aid by 2020 on disaster prevention, but overall, they spend just half that amount.

“It’s already a difficult financing environment,” said Ronald Jackson, executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, citing the multiple demands of the Sendai Framework, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the new global development goals launched last year.

He urged the Cancun meeting to recognise the synergies between the three agendas.

“Cutting disaster risk will allow countries to pursue their broader prosperity targets and reduce poverty under the Sustainable Development Goals,” he added.

Political weight

Last month, Robert Glasser, head of the UNISDR, said calculating the costs of natural disasters was a valuable way for governments to recognise and limit the potential for damage, especially as extreme weather linked to climate change intensifies.

Around 11,000 people died in 2016 as a result of natural and manmade disasters, which cost $175 billion in economic losses, according to reinsurer Swiss Re.

Hurricane Matthew was the year’s deadliest natural catastrophe, claiming around 1,000 lives, primarily in Haiti.

Cancun will also host a conference on early warning from May 22-23 and dozens of parallel events, all tackling the question of how best to keep people safe from disasters.

“There’s been significant progress in disaster being an important issue on the political agenda,” Carlos Villacis, director of applied science at the Pacific Disaster Center, said by phone from Hawaii.

15 years ago, most of the discussions were among technical experts, he noted.

“Now we have governments, presidents and ministers discussing this. That’s the right audience and we would like to see how they are utilising all this information.”

Innovative finance needed to find $300 billion a year for climate losses

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation): With money for action on climate change already in short supply, an estimated $300 billion a year needed to help countries deal with unavoidable climate losses will have to come from innovative new sources, such as a financial transaction tax or carbon tax, researchers say.

Funding for such climate ‘loss and damage’ aims to assist people who lose their land to sea level rise, for instance, or are forced to migrate as drought makes growing crops impossible in some regions.

“What stands out most clearly is that there isn’t currently enough funding to even begin thinking about financing loss and damage, with available climate, development, risk reduction and disaster recovery financing all falling short by an order of magnitude,” said researchers at the Berlin-based Heinrich Böll Foundation.

In a report released at the UN climate negotiations in Bonn, now heading into their second week, researchers said about $50 billion a year would be needed by 2020 to help people who lose their land and culture or are forced to migrate as a result of climate-related problems.

That need would likely hit at least $300 billion a year by 2030, said report authors Julie-Anne Richards, who works in the foundation’s climate justice programme, and Liane Schalatek, the foundation’s North America associate director.

Such spending would come on top of $100 billion a year in funding by 2020 that richer nations have already promised poorer ones under the Paris Agreement to help them develop cleanly and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

But that pledge is “very unlikely” to be met, the report said, with US President Donald Trump, for instance, saying he will not hand over $2 billion in US payments promised to the international Green Climate Fund. To find new cash to pay for “loss and damage”, innovative financing such as a new carbon tax, aviation tax or financial transaction tax should be considered, the authors said. Such money “could fairly and predictably fill much of the loss and damage finance gap”, the report said.

No new body should be created to handle and disperse the funds, however, they said, with money instead put through existing organisations such as the Green Climate Fund or the Global Environment Facility.

Harjeet Singh, who heads climate change policy for charity ActionAid, also said that setting up a new loss and damage funding body made no sense. “It’s so tedious to set up an institution and get it going, and make sure the money reaches the intended people. It does make sense to use the existing mechanisms to transfer the money,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview from Bonn.

The problem is that funding for loss and damage will be increasingly urgently needed as action to curb climate change falls short and efforts to adapt to more severe impacts struggle as well.

“Sea level is rising much faster than expected,” he said. “How will the humanitarian community deal with the increasing number of climate-related disasters?”

Finding the political will to deal with climate change – and the funds to deal with rising unavoidable losses – needs to be a priority as negotiators move toward putting the Paris Agreement on climate change into effect in 2018, the report said.

Delays in acting on climate change will not only lead to rising costs from losses and damage, the authors said, but also “cause unimaginable suffering and guarantee a less stable, more poverty- and inequality-stricken, more unhappy and less sustainable world”.