Project Syndicate<\/em> website.<\/p>\nTo spotlight the need for action, she sets out a litany of tragic signposts that mark the road to Sendai: Port-au-Price collapsed in an earthquake. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Drought killed an unknown number of people in the Horn of Africa. Floods and earthquakes affected millions in Pakistan and China. Heat waves and wildfires ravaged countries around the world.<\/p>\n
These incidents, she continues, are ‘stark reminders’ of the need for instruments like the HFA, especially because the drivers of risk \u2013 improper land use, non-existent or poorly implemented building codes, environmental degradation, poverty, climate change, and, most important, weak governance by inappropriate and insufficient institutions.<\/p>\n
But there have been some important successes of the last decade, says Ms. Wahlstr\u00f6m. \u201cIn Asia, where 80 per cent of the world’s natural disasters are concentrated, the number of people directly affected has dropped, decade-by-decade, by almost one billion, owing to measures like the Indian Ocean early warning system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Timely evacuations in the face of accurately forecasted major storm systems have enabled the Philippines to save thousands of lives just in the last year. And over the last three years, China has worked hard to keep economic losses within its 1.5 per cent-of-GDP target.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Turkey will have earthquake-proofed every school and hospital in the country by 2017, Ms. Wahlstr\u00f6m continues, while adding that Ethiopia has developed a sophisticated data management system to help guide its efforts to address not only drought but also other natural hazards. Both countries \u2013 and many others \u2013 have incorporated the study of disaster risk into their school curriculums.<\/p>\n
And the European Union has estimated that \u20ac1 ($1.18) spent on flood protection brings \u20ac6 in savings. She goes on to say that in the United Kingdom, investment in flood defences meant that 800,000 properties were protected during last winter’s storms, significantly reducing the bill for response and recovery.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, noting that 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the devastating Kobe earthquake, Ms. Wahlstr\u00f6m points out that in the past 44 years, disasters caused by weather, climate, and water-related hazards have led to 3.5 million deaths, according to UNISDR. Even where people’s lives are saved, their livelihoods are often decimated. Since 1960, disasters have cost the world more than $3.5 trillion, which both developed and developing counties paying a huge price.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is why world leaders, through the HFA, need to agree to scale up efforts to cope with the risks posed by rising sea levels, global warming, rampant urbanization and rapid population growth,\u201d she says, adding: \u201cOnly with strong political commitment at the highest level can real progress towards a safer, more sustainable future be made.\u201d<\/p>\n
With that in mind she says that it should not be difficult to win support for a revised HFA. \u201cAfter all, there is no compelling \u2013 or even rational \u2013 reason which a finance minister or CEO would choose to pay for recovery but not invest in prevention.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the UN conference produces the right agreement, resilience can become the hallmark of 2015, setting the tone for agreements later in the year on climate change and sustainable development \u2013 both of which hold important implications for disaster risk,\u201d Ms. Wahlstr\u00f6m concludes.<\/p>\n
via UN News Centre<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ten years ago today, world leaders in Hyogo, Japan agreed on a framework to better manage risk and curb the impact of disasters in the wake of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami \u2013 which claimed some 227,000 lives \u2013 and in March, they are set to meet for a United Nations conference in another Japanese city to take stock of whether the world has lived up to that promise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,17,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cities","category-infrastructure","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/230"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/sustainabledevelopment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}