“Does the current architecture and organisational mix really help to eliminate the ‘silent’ disasters and the everyday risks that now form a major part of how we understand disaster impacts?” Tom Mitchell, Head of Climate Change at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) insists on the need for a different approach committed to making disaster risk reduction a central component of poverty reduction efforts. In an article today, he makes 7 recommendations for the next Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), the global agreement on reducing disaster risk, which, like the Millennium Development Goals, is due for renewal in 2015:
1. Ensure ‘tacking vulnerability and its causes’ is the dominant message.
2. Improve accountability – embedding clear targets for reducing disaster losses, and signalling better data collection and analysis.
3. Run until 2030, ensuring that the pattern of disaster risk in 2030 and beyond is a key signal for the level of ambition required.
4. Bury the humanitarian-development divide.
5. Foster private sector leadership, but don’t treat it as a panacea or a substitute.
6. Not make complex, expensive ‘risk assessments’ a barrier to action.
7. Encourage upstream investment, including by making disaster risk management a feature of development cooperation and national public expenditure.
For the expanded points, read the entire article here.