I am delighted to be delivering remarks on the International Day for Disaster Reduction today, am doing so in my very new capacity as UNDP Deputy Regional Director for Asian and the Pacific and a co-chair of the UN IBC for Building Resilience.

On a personal note, having just arrived from Indonesia where I served UNDP for 5 years, I am both acutely aware of the impacts of disasters and of the imperative necessity of comprehensive effective disaster risk management at central and local levels, which is what the Day and our discussion are about.

This year’s IDDRR day is important for two additional reasons – a very obvious one is that it takes place within the context of the COVID-19 disaster, and the second, which we should not forget, is that it marks the year when countries are to meet the Sendai Target E for having national and local DRR strategies in place.

On COVID-19, as we see, the brutality of the disruption that COVID-19 wrought on many countries in the Asia-Pacific region laid bare all past efforts at building resilience and reducing vulnerabilities. But in a longer-term view, the crisis calls also on Government, national and international actors to rethink the inter-sectoral nature of disaster risk management. The importance and cascading effects of the health system resilience being one of the most obvious illustrations of this inter-relation.

You may have seen a very just published very timely study led by UNDP with valuable contributions from the member of the IBC on Building Resilience called - Recovering from COVID-19: Lessons from past disasters in Asia and the Pacific.  I am calling a very timely one because it does two things, one it highlights precisely the necessity to look at risk in a broader systemic way and to more effectively address underlying drivers of risk – such as poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, human rights violations, fragility and others. Second and very practically, it offers 10 lessons and shares good disaster-related practices from the region. Let me just share briefly with you 5 of them that are most relevant to our discussion on DRR governance. 

• One is the imperative need to include pandemic response and preparedness in countries legal, regulatory and policy frameworks. While for years, pandemic and zoonosis were predicted to happen, few countries if any actually did that. Hopefully, many now will. Faced with COVID-19, most countries lacked protocols for pandemic response so responses were ad hoc. Recent reviews of DRM laws and strategies by the International Federation of the Red Cross and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction respectively reveal that pandemic response and preparedness is not adequately integrated into disaster/natural hazard response and preparedness.

• Two is the decisive importance of leadership in crisis for swift and decisive action. Countries that were able to contain the spread of the virus took rapid action and robust measures. Some benefitted from having learned from their past experiences of pandemics/epidemics such as SARS, MERS, Avian influenza and the Nipah virus, but not all of them, as we see with New Zealand.

• Three, is the importance of empowered decentralization for governance in a pandemic disaster time. Effective decentralization is a complex undertaking even under normal circumstances. During the crisis, we have seen examples of devolution or decentralization of administrative and financial authority, we have also seen and are still seeing tensions and competition between central and local Governments. In that context, strong evidence is emerging of the value of empowered decentralization both for the health management of the pandemic and the continuity of the provision of public services to citizens at provincial, district and local/ grassroots levels.

• Four and linked to my last point, citizen voices must be sought and included in the next generation governance. Innovation and technology allow more easily for this technically, however political will is required. Recalling our commitment to “Leave No One Behind”, let me stress the importance of all vulnerable and marginalized groups in citizens’ participation.

• Five, financing for recovery and the buffering of future shocks should be innovative, diversified and better risk-informed. Innovative financing instruments, such as SDGs or Green Bonds, social impact investment, insurance mechanisms are required to finance recovery. The same instruments are required to reduce people’s vulnerabilities through revamped social protection schemes with universal coverage, temporary or even universal basic income.

Underpinning all this and also part of the support that UNDP, the United Nations Development System and development partners can provide is the need for data, risk information and assessments that help to frame real time responses that are evidence-based.

I hope that the sharing of these 5 lessons will prompt you to read the study and find more about the remaining 5 findings. Effective Disaster management in COVID-19 is a more ambitious task than ever, it is also a more necessary one. I hope that the marking of this IDDRR and this very event will encourage us to take up the challenge.

Thank you.

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Remarks delivered at the 2020 International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction (IDDRR) - UNDRR Webinar on Disaster Risk Governance in the Aftermath of COVID-19