The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) has released the 2025 edition of its flagship Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR), which outlines how embedding risk reduction into policy and investment decisions can help “break the recurring cycle of shocks, losses and debt.” The report presents case studies and policy recommendations for how investing in resilience can help halt the growing economic cost of disasters, reduce humanitarian needs, and make international assistance more effective.

Themed, ‘Resilience Pays: Financing and Investing for Our Future,’ GAR 2025 finds that with more frequent and intense hazard events, unsafe urbanization, and ineffective development, disaster risk is increasing – and so are the costs. Between 1970 and 2000, the inflation-adjusted direct costs of disasters were USD 70 billion to USD 80 billion per year on average. Between 2001 and 2020, these costs had increased to USD 180 billion to USD 200 billion per year. However, the report argues, the disasters cost much more to the global economy. When wider social and ecosystem losses are taken into account, the annual figure is close to USD 2.3 trillion.

According to GAR 2025, DRR can serve as “a powerful lever to accelerate sustainable development” by reducing such losses. Investments in building resilience, the report argues, support progress across multiple SDGs, including SDG 2 (zero hunger), SDG 4 (quality education), SDG 5 (gender equality), SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation), SDG 3 (good health and well-being), and SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), and SDG 13 (climate action), with mutually reinforcing co-benefits.

To accelerate DRR for the 21st century, the report recommends action in six key areas:

• Democratize risk understanding, by enabling access to robust risk information through both local knowledge and technological advances;
• Use public financing and regulation to break the “risk-creation addiction,” by embedding sustainable disaster risk financing strategies into government operations and mandating resilience standards in public infrastructure and investment;
• Innovate to keep risk transfer and insurance sustainable, by exploring expanded risk transfer solutions, including finance for adaptation and loss and damage, among other types of risk-sharing instruments;
• Make the business case to incentivize private sector innovation and investment in DRR;
• Anticipate shocks to reduce humanitarian need while “recognizing that disasters arise not only from hazards, but also from underlying vulnerabilities or heightened exposure that enable hazards to escalate into humanitarian crises”; and
• Leverage the multiplier effect of international financial mechanisms, “to share risk more broadly, find better ways to prevent fiscal gaps, and support faster, better-targeted recovery.”

GAR 2025 was released on 27 May, ahead of the eighth session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction. According to a UNDRR press release, its findings will also feed into the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) as they “speak to specific options for enhancing multilateral finance to better protect smaller developing economies.” [Publication: Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2025: Resilience Pays: Financing and Investing for Our Future] [Executive Summary] [GAR 2025 Online] [UN News Story]