8 October 2012: The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has released a background note on options for including disaster resilience in post-2015 development goals. The paper highlights that disaster risk management cuts across traditional development sectors including health, education, infrastructure, water and agriculture, and it assesses how disaster resilience could be integrated “horizontally” in a range of sector goals.

Recalling that since the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, or Rio Earth Summit) in 1992, disasters associated with natural hazards have affected 4.4 billion people, caused US$2 trillion in damage and killed 1.3 million people, the note says disaster risks and losses are expected to increase in the next 20 years.

The paper argues that coinciding timetables for three processes – agreeing on a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), considering the renewal of the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) 2005-2015 (the global agreement to build resilience to disasters), and a 2015 climate change agreement – provide opportunities for coherence and synergies on reducing risks and strengthening resilience.

It also suggests a number of options for a stand-alone goal on disaster resilience, including several indicators and targets, based on the assumption that the post-2015 development goals will retain an overall focus on poverty reduction as one core objective. It identifies pros and cons of each option, and stresses that specific targets and indicators will need to be tailored to the different framing of the post-2015 development goals, and that flexibility should be retained since the objectives and form of the post-2015 development agenda have not been defined yet.

On efforts to include disaster resilience in the post-2015 development agenda, the note recommends: being clear on why disaster risk management works and why it is a good investment; projecting the impacts of disasters on poverty levels over the next 10-20 years; and assessing the availability of data and set realistic targets.

The note also discusses: shortcomings in existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) targets and indicators; humanitarian action in the post-2015 development framework; and the quantity and quality of disasters data, inter alia. It concludes with an eight-point checklist, or criteria, for targets and indicators on disaster resilience. [Publication: Options for Including Disaster Resilience in Post-2015 Development Goals]