Global Assessment report
Context
The world will face around 560 disasters every year by 2030, warned the United Nations in a new report.
Key Points
- The world has experienced 350-500 medium- to large-scale disasters every year over the last 20 years, said the report published on March 26, 2022.
- This is five times higher than the previous three decades.
- The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) released the report ahead of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in May 2022.
Reasons
- Poor governance and risk management systems are fundamentally underestimating true global risk and putting all our socio-economic gains in danger.
- Lack of data will be a major obstacle to addressing the risks which are not measured well.
Impact
- Annual direct economic loss from disasters has more than doubled over the past three decades. It increased to over $170 billion in the 2010s from an average of around $70 billion in the 1990s.
- An additional 37.6 million people are estimated to be living in conditions of extreme poverty due to the impacts of climate change and disasters by 2030.
- A majority of countries including the Philippines, Bangladesh, Myanmar, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam from the Asia-Pacific region will face a high disaster risk are also among those with the highest share of population living under the national poverty line.
- Around 90 per cent of the countries which are at a high-risk index are middle and lower-income countries, with an average national poverty rate of 34 per cent.
- Low-risk countries have a poverty rate of less than one per cent.
- The Asia and Pacific region, where the countries lose on average 1.6 per cent of GDP to disasters each year.
- Africa is the second-most affected region, losing an average of 0.6 per cent of GDP to disasters, the UN estimated.
- The first four months of 2022 have been devastating for Africa, which faced at least six major climate-led disasters, including the recent floods in South Africa, the body noted.
- The damaging floods in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa followed three tropical cyclones and two tropical storms that hit South-East Africa in just six weeks of the year.
Conclusion
Insurance is a key tool to adapt for building back from disasters.
Insurance is extremely concentrated in richer countries, with the insurance coverage rate in most developing and emerging economies well below 10 per cent and sometimes almost zero, despite facing greater impact from disasters.
The recommendations in the report were built on the Glasgow Pact of the 26th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that called for a doubling of finance to support developing countries in adapting to the impacts of climate change and building resilience.
There is also the need for governments and the financial industry to improve the accounting of the financial assets at risk under various future climate change scenarios.
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction
- It was established in 1999 for the implementation of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).
- It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
- it is an organisational unit of the UN Secretariat and led by the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction.
- United Nations system for the coordination of disaster reduction and to ensure synergies among the disaster reduction activities.
- It is published once in two years by the UNDRR and is the product of the contributions of nations, public and private disaster risk-related science and research, and others.
