Global Initiative on Disaster Risk Management II
Project description
Project title: Global Initiative on Disaster Risk Management (GIDRM) II
Commissioned by: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Countries: Global; Philippines, Mexico
Overall term: 2018 to 2020
Context
Approximately 200 million people are annually affected by extreme natural events such as earthquakes, severe storms, prolonged droughts or heavy flooding. More and more people, infrastructure and assets are located in densely populated areas and in increasingly vulnerable regions. With the rapid growth of urban areas and economic zones, however, disaster risks are barely considered.
Disaster risk management (DRM) is at the heart of the international framework for disaster risk reduction established by the United Nations (UN Sendai Framework). It is also reflected as a cross-sectoral issue in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and is further recognised by all major international agendas such as the 2030 Agenda and the New Urban Agenda. Implementing DRM is therefore a globally accepted requirement for all nations.
However, the euphoria surrounding the development of these agendas in 2015 has led to limited alignment of the different agreements. The agendas are the result of negotiations of different specialist communities with their selective perception of global problems such as sustainability, climate change and urbanisation and their own priorities and terminology. These international agreements require different actions and commitments from different ministries and stakeholders at national and local level to develop nationally appropriate strategies for tackling global challenges. This requirement leads to a considerable amount of additional burden for countries such as increased costs due to factors including overlapping areas of responsibility and duplication in data collection and reporting. At the same time, countries incur tremendous opportunity costs when DRM is not considered in their national climate adaptation, urban development and economic and social development plans and policies.
Objective
Selected international and national, state and non-state actors will be supported in their ambition to achieve coherence between the Sendai Framework and the Paris Climate Agreement and other international agendas such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda, with regard to planning, implementing and reporting on DRM.
Approach
The Global Initiative on Disaster Risk Management (GIDRM) project is aiming to support from the “bottom-up”. This approach is achieved by presenting national and sub-national examples of successful agenda coherence on regional platforms, introducing them as regional recommendations at major international conferences to ultimately be confirmed as regional good practices.
To do this, the project is working in two pilot countries, which are particularly affected by extreme natural events and possess the necessary institutional capacities and an established development cooperation portfolio that can be built upon – Mexico and the Philippines.
Mexico
In Mexico, the GIDRM is advising the office of the President on how to integrate the requirements of the Sendai Framework for DRM into the Mexican National Sustainability Strategy.
The Ministry of Finance and Public Credit intends to incorporate DRM and climate adaptation measures more systematically into its processes for structuring, preparing and assessing public investment projects, and is being supported in this by the project. The GIDRM is assisting the Ministry of Finance in the development of methods and processes with the following objectives:
- Prioritising the projects that require an in-depth disaster risk analysis
- Integrating measures to reduce risk and adapt to climate change into the prioritised projects
These measures, while spearheaded by the Finance Ministry, are also being implemented in close collaboration with the Ministry of Communications and Transportation, representing a pilot sector, and the National Center for the Prevention of Disasters (Centro Nacional de Prevención de Desastres, or CENAPRED for short) using existing resources, processes and capacities for greater coherence.
The Philippines
In the Philippines, the GIDRM is supporting the Government, specifically the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) to standardise the numerous risk assessment approaches and planning guidelines of various ministries. Until now, municipalities and local government units, which were already scarce in resources, are expected to coordinate the different requirements of global agendas themselves. This can lead to a lack of focus and work overload. Based on clearly prioritised measures, improved planning will be translated into local project proposals that give equal consideration to climate and disaster risks (e.g. in public building codes) and can be financed through budgets that do not focus solely on one of the topics.
At the crossroads of sustainable development /the 2030 Agenda and DRM /Sendai, the Department of Tourism (DoT) in the Philippines will be supported in aligning standards for resilient tourism services and infrastructure with the existing national accommodation standards.