Bangkok to Sendai and Beyond: Implications for Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia

The Bangkok Declaration on Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia and the Pacific 2014 (AMCDRR 2014a) reflects deliberations at the 6th AMCDRR, and calls on all governments and stakeholders to: (1) enhance resilience at local levels; (2) improve public investments for disaster and climate risk management; (3) strengthen public and private partnership for DRR; (4) promote the use and further development of science, technology, and innovation; (5) enhance governance, transparency, and accountability; (6) contribute to the post-2015 framework; and (7) build coherence between the post-2015 framework and the concurrent processes. The Statement of Voluntary Commitments of Mayor and Local Governments generated in the 6th AMCDRR (2014c) expects cities and local governments to play a much bigger role in the post-2015 framework. The major actions for the evolving post-2015 framework mentioned in the statement include: (1) strengthen the role and functions of local governments in DRR; (2) promote peer-to-peer learning amongst cities and local governments to enhance local resilience; and (3) design evacuation shelters and identify prospective evacuation sites. The statement also suggested the need to develop short-term and long-term DRR strategies. Activities in the short-term strategies are mainly conducted at the local and national levels (AMCDRR 2014a). The major activities are: (1) involve local government in the formulation of risk assessment and technical guidelines; (2) improve regulations and local government’ structure in DRR; (3) incorporate risk sensitivity into spatial and local planning, and (4) develop structures through which youth can participate in DRR programs.

The Bangkok Declaration (AMCDRR 2014a) adopted at the 6th AMCDRR called upon governments to support for further inclusion of vulnerable groups in DRR, such as children and youth, with the aim of enhancing local resilience. Children and youth are recognized as not only a vulnerable group in disasters, but also as one of the stakeholders who can contribute to DRR. In fact, various stakeholders recognized the importance of inclusion of children and youth when five voluntary commitments out of 10, annexed to the declaration, included the word “youth.” For example, the stakeholder groups of Civil Society Organizations (AMCDRR 2014e) and Local Governments (AMCDRR 2014c) promised to promote youth participation in planning and implementation of DRR-related activities to build capacity at the local level. The main stakeholder group of Children, Youth and Child-Centered Organizations, which was composed of various child-centered humanitarian NGOs and United Nations organizations, expressed concern about children and youth due to their vulnerability in disasters and climate change in terms of health, education, and psychology. More than 50 % of the world’s youth between the age of 15 and 24 reside in the Asia-Pacific region, this stakeholder group issued a powerful call for the SFDRR to include the protection of children and youth as a central feature of the Sendai Framework. Children-centered stakeholders emphasized sanitation, education, and the safety of school buildings as essential to DRR rather than merely improving the participation of children and youth in DRR (AMCDRR 2014d). These groups made a commitment to take action to: (1) expand programs for children- and youth-centered DRR and climate change adaption (CCA); (2) disseminate research and advocate for the inclusion and participation of children and youth in DRR; (3) create a space for discussion and sharing of practices for school safety; and (4) coordinate and promote the Comprehensive School Safety (CSS) framework. The CSS framework rests on three pillars—safe learning facilities; school disaster management; and risk reduction and resilience education (UNISDR 2014).

The Bangkok Declaration (AMCDRR 2014a) also called for further development of science, technology, and innovation in the region through investment in research and higher education. Private sector enterprises, especially insurance agencies, were identified as potential stakeholders that can put scientific research forward by sound investment. The Bangkok Declaration envisaged affordable technology to be accessible and available to national and local governments, although local communities needed to facilitate technology transfer. In order to promote better understanding of risk, including the emerging risks from climate change, the declaration recommended case-based learning, sharing of comparable data on disaster losses, hazards, and vulnerabilities, and dissemination of the best practices among universities and scientific forums. The focus of this conference is the voluntary commitments made by the “Technology and Academic Stakeholder Group.” The major commitments include: (1) improve collaboration with related stakeholders; (2) promote a holistic, science-based approach towards community resilience including physical, natural, and human aspects; (3) support the use of development in the field of science and technology through increased earth observation; (4) develop course curriculum and promote higher education in DRR; and (5) promote community- and problem-based action research. Commitments made by the group encompassed a few time-bound targets such as at least five countries in the Asia-Pacific region will have two universities providing Masters level disaster education by 2016. Similarly, financial commitments were made by the AXA Research Fund to grant risk research worth €100 million from 2013 to 2018. Medium-term targets, such as an increase in the number of national science foundations by 15 % and expansion of monitoring and observation platforms by 10 %, were also affirmed as feasible by 2020. Long-term targets, to be achieved by 2025, include higher penetration and efficiency of weather forecasting and climate predictions, half of the country population to be brought under basic early warning systems for natural hazards, and enhanced performance (by 25 %) by the science ministries in science-based DRR activities.

In Asia, the private sector has faced more loss when compared to the public sector in the last decade. This differential loss potential let the AMCDRR to encourage more active participation of the private sector in DRR. The 5th AMCDRR in 2012 focused on the private sector’s engagement by developing and supporting local and national governments’ risk assessment as well as by increased resilience of building and investment decisions. Regarded as equally important were cooperation with multiple partners to prioritize resilience in land-use planning and design and promotion of investments resilient to the anticipated impacts of extreme climactic events and the new risks (water crisis, epidemics, urban flooding) arising from rapid urbanization (Perwaiz 2014). In the 6th AMCDRR, UNISDR formed the disaster risk reduction private sector partnership (DRR–PSP) with 13 Asian businesses houses and the Private Sector Advisory Group (PSAG) with four Asian members who have signed the Statement of Commitment for Disaster Prevention, Resilience and Risk Reduction (AMCDRR 2014b). Three action points with specific indicators as given in Table 1 were agreed to monitor the progress made in DRR in Asia.

Local governments need to play significant roles in local DRR. UNISDR developed the Local Government Self-Assessment Tool (LGSAT) under the initiative “Making Cities Resilient: My City is Getting Ready,” with an intention to help cities and local actors to set baselines, identify, gaps, and have comparable data across local governments (UNISDR 2013).

The SFDRR proposed four priorities for action: (1) understanding disaster risk; (2) strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk; (3) investing in DRR for resilience; and (4) enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response, and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction. Each priority for action has key activities at national and local levels. The SFDRR requests all stakeholders to take into consideration these key activities. The key activities in understanding disaster risk are expecting the local government to facilitate a science-policy interface for effective decision making in disaster risk management and to share disaster risk information with people. To achieve these goals, it is crucial to build the knowledge of government officials through sharing experiences, lessons learned, good practices, and training and education on DRR (Weichselgartner and Pigeon 2015). Further development of local frameworks of laws, regulations, and public policies is considered as one of the significant points for strengthening disaster risk governance and reducing disaster risk. Adopting and implementing local DRR strategies and plans are expected to be among the responsibilities of local government. The objective is to prevent the creation of risk, reduce existing risk, and strengthen the resilience of economy, society, health, and environment. Public and private investment is essential to enhance the economic status, social well-being, health security, and cultural resilience of individuals and communities. To accelerate investment in DRR for resilience, the allocation of necessary resources, including finance, is important for the development and the implementation of DRR strategies, policies, plans, laws, and regulations. In the key activities for this priority, the term “public and private partnership” is not shown in SFDRR, although such partnerships are emphasized in the commitment found in AMCDRR (AMCDRR 2014a). To enhance disaster preparedness for effective response and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction phases, one of the challenges is to empower women and persons with disabilities. There is a need to promote gender equality and to make available universally accessible access to response, recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction resources. Establishing community centers, adopting gender and disability neutral public policies and actions, promoting cooperation among diverse institutions, multiple authorities, and related stakeholders, and other key activities will help to improve the status and condition of women and persons with disabilities. The term “Build Back Better,” set against the extreme needs created by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 has created practical implementation challenges due to differences in understanding and raising expectations, which were not matched by the reconstruction process on the ground (Kennedy et al. 2009).

The SFDRR identified national and local governments as important stakeholders who need to engage fully or partially with other stakeholders such as civil society and volunteers, research institutions, private sector enterprises, and the media for strengthening resilience.

Agenda 21 of the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992 described children and youth as one of the necessary nonstate stakeholders to achieve sustainable development and formed the basis for the selection of major groups in the third UN WCDRR. But children and youth have long been considered as particularly vulnerable groups, though they have a great deal to contribute to DRR efforts (Cumiskey et al. 2015). Children and youth also were considered as passive victims and were hardly considered as contributors in DRR (Anderson 2005).

The SFDRR has been set up to guide “the substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses” (UNISDR 2015, p. 6) and it is necessary to include various stakeholders to accomplish this goal. The SFDRR acknowledges that children and youth are “agents of change” and calls for countries to make space and opportunity for children and youth to contribute to DRR through legislation, national practice, and educational curricula (UNISDR 2015, p. 20). Even though the SFDRR did not mention any particular role of children and youth, case studies demonstrate that they are capable of effective contributions to before, during, and after disaster phases (Cumiskey et al. 2015). Major groups, such as women and farmers (Stough and Kang 2015), have particular roles and responsibilities for policy decisions about and early warning of extreme events, but no such roles have been discussed in the SFDRR for children and youth. For example, SFDRR indicates that women’s participation is essential to implement gender-sensitive policies and indigenous people can contribute to early warning through their experiences and knowledge (UNISDR 2015). Children and youth have been found to share information of disaster preparedness with their community (Ronan et al. 2008), have brought creative and resourceful ideas to DRR activities (Bartlett 2008), and have engaged actively as volunteers in relief and response work (Perren-Klingler 1996).

In fact, The UN Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY) sponsored a preliminary WCDRR forum whose web site (https://​www.​childrenyouth.​org/​involved) indicates that a large number of children and youth have been involved in DRR activities across various regions (Cumiskey et al. 2015). According to data provided by the executive committee of the forum, approximately 1050 children and youth globally applied for the forum, of which 801 were from Asia and 199 from Africa. The children subgroup (below 15 years) was inadequately represented as part of MGCY in WCDRR with only four applicants in comparison to 727 applicants representing the youth subgroup. After screening, around 200 children and youth from 35 countries qualified and attended the forum, which did not include NGOs who work with children.

The SFDRR called on governments to involve children and youth in DRR programs with nonstate stakeholders. “Civil Society Organizations” and “Local Governments” made voluntary commitments at the 6th AMCDRR (AMCDRR 2014c, e), which admitted the importance of working with children and youth to strengthen local capacities. This is an important step considering the view of Fernandez and Shaw (2013) for making full use of knowledge and skills of children and youth. It is important to ensure a supporting environment by adults. In addition, the effectiveness of children and youth in sharing preparedness information can be enhanced through working with the scientific community and nonstate stakeholders.

The importance of science and technology in better understanding and coping with disasters has gained greater acceptance in recent years (Aitsi-Selmi et al. 2015). Soon after the adoption of the HFA, a collective consensus emerged that strategies for DRR require a more integrated approach that engages all scientists, engineers, and policy planners, and that policy guidelines in the post-HFA period should better integrate with science and technology. Over the previous years, several science-policy negotiations and multilateral dialogues contributed to the post-2015 framework for DRR, which identified the need to bring science and technology into the policy and planning mainstream for effective risk reduction.

One of the key recognition of the themes of the 2015 Tokyo conference was the emergence of science and technology stakeholder’s group that collectively brought a number of recommendations such as prompting scientific DRR research; establishing a university and researcher network; sharing data and encouraging open sourcing; developing global standards for DRR. In line with this, the Tokyo Conference on International Study for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience in January 2015 was the culmination of several important preliminary events. Jointly organized by the Science Council of Japan, the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) program, and UNISDR, the resulting Tokyo Statement (Science Council of Japan et al. 2015) summarizes the overall strategic goals for actions that mainstream science and technology in DRR. The main agenda of this conference was to develop collective platform for evidence based learning, sharing and archiving disaster data, and developing uniform methodology on data collection and economic analysis of disasters (Science Council of Japan et al. 2015).

From an Asian perspective, a holistic approach is needed to better integrate science and technology with DRR policies in the light of the high economic losses the region has suffered from disasters. Although the region has advanced significantly as observed in the Bangkok Declaration, integration of science and technology in DRR is at present broadly based. While the SFDRR is surely a reflection of what has been agreed so far in Bangkok (AMCDRR 2014a), it is imperative to look at the commonalities and differences of these two important frameworks to understand the degree to which science and technology have entered the mainstream of DRR.

The Bangkok Declaration and the SFDRR outline the common priorities, such as rigorous DRR research, collaborative platforms for DRR, investment in risk research, and promotion of dialogues between policy planners, decision-makers, and scientific and the technological communities. The issues identified in SFDRR stress advanced and affordable early warning, involve the private sector in disaster research, and share nonstrategic data among the member countries; all of these concerns are in line with the Bangkok Declaration. Purely on technical grounds, the proposal for updating the UNISDR (2009) terminology on DRR is praiseworthy. The challenge of the SFDRR, however, is found in the need to establish baseline data, mainly soft quantitative data that is supported by background analysis of a particular situation or a region and to overcome the absence of qualitative and quantitative targets for achievements. A follow-up AMCDRR in India will probably encompass strategies for implementation of the WCDRRs’ priorities of actions. This view was echoed in the suggestions made by various countries to include “substantial” at the beginning of relevant targets to reflect a stronger qualitative option, while other countries proposed quantitative targets at the national level and qualitative targets for global achievements. Baseline data are important for damage and loss assessment, and a longer time range of data is needed in order to reveal meaningful trends, and align with methodologies that measure progress. The commitments made by the science and technology stakeholder group in the third WCDRR lack robustness and, unfortunately, are not accompanied with measurable targets. In contrast, stakeholder commitments made in the 6th AMCDRR are time-bound and target-based.

The first two WCDRR, in Yokohama and Hyogo, did not consider the private sector as an important stakeholder in DRR. The UNISDR summary report (UNISDR 2013) suggests that across the world, the private sector’s engagement in DRR has been sporadic. The third WCDRR in Sendai makes a conscious effort to engage the active participation of the private sector through various local, national, and regional dialogues. Two of the seven global targets focus on reducing direct disaster-induced economic loss and diminishing disaster damage to critical infrastructure as well as disruption of basic services by 2030. The UN business and industry major group has committed to work with governments on resilient and risk-sensitive financial investment and resilience-building rating systems that would build knowledge and share best practices among various stakeholders. The role of the private sector as identified in SFDRR under various priorities is listed below.

Priority 1 “Understanding disaster risk,” builds the knowledge of the private sector, through sharing experiences, lessons learned, good practices, and training and education on DRR. At the global and regional level, the private sector needs to establish, disseminate, and share good practices. Priority 2 “Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk” focuses on the role of the private sector in developing quality standards, certifications, and awards for disaster risk management. Priority 3 concentrates on “Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience” through structural and non-structural measures. The private sector is called on to assign the necessary financial and logistical resources with which the development and the implementation of DRR, plans strategies, policies, and legal mechanisms can be fostered. The SFDRR emphasizes setting up mechanisms for disaster risk transfer and insurance, risk sharing and retention, financial protection, and disaster resilient investment. In addition, the SFDRR emphasize on integrating DRR into financial and fiscal instruments and stresses the increase of business resilience, protection of vulnerable livelihoods, and security of productive assets throughout global supply chains.

The conference also emphasized the role of the private sector in urban resilience because a major share of investment in cities is made by the private sector and highlighted the importance of public–private collaboration for financing, design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure. These priority areas of action, although related broadly to priorities identified in the 6th AMCDRR (2014a), lack indicators and specific time lines for implementation. The voluntary nature of the commitments undertaken at the WCDRR is not supported by a legally binding agreement, which leaves implementation open ended for the private sector and other stakeholders to determine as they see fit. Although the framework covers 15 years, there is no intermediate monitoring mechanism built into the framework’s priorities for action and thus no formal instrument for periodic review of progress.