Disasters are something which we heard about only infrequently, even 20 years back, such as a flood in Bangladesh, a cyclone in Haiti or an earthquake in Iran. But we seem to hear about disasters now much more frequently. Are there more disasters happening around the world, or are we just hearing about them due to better communication and global connectivity?

The answer to this question is not simple. True, there is better connectivity and more communication with social media, making everybody a reporter and every twitter feed a media. Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of natural hazards such as cyclones and high rainfall events. But based on the evidence, more and more disasters happen because we tend to place our ever increasing resources in harm’s way.

Disasters occur when a resource, be it community, infrastructure or environment, intersects with a natural hazard. Geological hazards, like earthquakes and tsunamis, have more or less been constant on a historical scale. Climatic hazards are on the rise, but at the same time, humanity is expanding and getting richer. People are moving into places which so far had remained un-inhabited, and they are building more and more infrastructure in locations which were once remote.

As natural hazards is a variable we can’t fully control, our efforts must focus on reducing exposure and increasing capacity of communities to deal with the disasters. This is how we build resilience of communities and thus countries.

Over the past ten years, UN Environment has been leading global efforts to introduce ecosystem-based approaches to disaster risk reduction or Eco-DRR. A number of environmental features, such as coastal mangroves, wetlands or forests have shown the ability to buffer natural hazards as well as assist communities to recover faster. By protecting existing environmental resources and by establishing new ecosystems which offer such protection services, one could minimise disaster risks and maximise community resilience. As environmental protection offers a number of additional ecosystem services which communities can benefit from, even during periods without disasters, such Eco-DRR approaches offer superior long term returns compared to grey infrastructure. The challenge, however, is to turn around the engineering community into considering green infrastructure based on Eco-DRR principles or hybrid infrastructure which combine both green and grey infrastructure, when they develop conceptual designs for urban or coastal resilience.

The lecture will cover UN Environment’s efforts in this domain, the Partnership for Environment and Disaster Risk Reduction which was established to promote Eco-DRR globally, our efforts to build capacity through Massive Open Online Courses and our success in getting ecosystem-based approaches in global frameworks on disaster risk reduction. The lecture will also cover the challenges we are facing in getting such approaches accepted by the engineering community and present that for discussion.