UNDRR: Time is Running Out for a World at Risk

By Denis McClean
 

The Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction opened in Geneva today with the focus on raising levels of ambition when it comes to reducing disaster risk in a world where vulnerability and exposure is dramatically on the rise.

Four years after the adoption of the Sendai Framework – the global plan to reduce disaster losses - 116 UN Member States are reporting against the seven targets including those for reducing mortality, reducing the numbers of people affected, economic losses and damage to critical infrastructure.

Speaking on the opening day, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, Mami Mizutori, said while there is promising progress in many areas “time is running out for a world at risk…threats that were considered inconceivable, no longer are.”

At the Welcome Ceremony, she said: “Over the first four years of the Sendai Framework we have also seen how prescient it was that the text expanded the traditional limits of disaster risk reduction beyond natural hazards to include man-made hazards as well as related environmental, technological and biological hazards and risks.”

Ms. Mizutori called for accelerated efforts to implement the Sendai Framework and lamented the fact that “the bar is being raised for resilience with every day that passes without progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.”

Read the full Press Release here.

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