Blogs

Natural disasters do not discriminate, affecting coastlines and mountain villages, prairies and plateaus, major and minor cities—in corridors largely populated by the poor. Committing financial resources before potential disasters, recent research at The World Bank Group indicates, is smart. An impact evaluation of Mexico’s fund for natural disasters found that it increased post-disaster gross domestic product by 2–4 percent, a big benefit.

Japan’s success in building resilience and disaster risk management has also been helping the Philippines build up its strategies to protect people and assets from harm.

Venice may seem like an unlikely location for an international development conference. But even though the Italian city is best known for its touristic appeal, it also turned out to be the perfect setting for the Understanding Risk Forum 2016.

Without action, parts of Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok and numerous other coastal cities around the globe will continue to sink faster than the sea level rises. But a new report, The Making of a Riskier Future: How Our Decisions are Shaping Future Disaster Risk, documents that the threat to some of the world’s coastal megacities comes not as much from the sea but from within.

We at the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery are excited this week to launch ThinkHazard!—a tool that will get natural disaster information into the hands of the people who really “need to know”.

Climate change is making the risk landscape more dynamic. It will take smarter, faster, innovative analytical tools to create the kind of up-to-date analysis of natural hazard risks that policy makers need to make long-term, risk-informed decisions.

One year ago today, the first in a series of massive earthquakes rocked Nepal. Nearly 9 thousand people lost their lives in the disaster. Over 20 thousand people were injured – many critically. As many as 450 aftershocks have shook the country since.

Protection to flooding changes the risk that communities face, with higher protection standards generally meaning less risk of damages and fatalities. But understanding of flood risk, especially at large scales, is made difficult by the fact that for most places we simply do not know what the current standards of protection are.

Also known as the "garden city”, Singapore is set to become a "city in a garden”. The abundance of greenery is a striking feature, with parks, green roofs, street side plants, and trees on every corner. But greenery is not there just to please the eye and create livable public areas — it also helps mitigate the risk of flooding.

In this video, Keiko Sakoda Kaneda (Disaster Risk Management Hub, Tokyo) and Daniel Levine (Tokyo Development Learning Center) elaborate on some of the key elements of their work program, and explain how they collaborate with development partners from around the world.