GENEVA, Switzerland (CMC) — The head of disaster risk reduction at the United Nations (UN), Kamal Kishore, says he is pleased that Caribbean and countries in the Americas are taking seriously the financing of disaster risk reduction.

Kishore said that much progress has been made in reducing the number of deaths as a result of disasters in the first 10 years of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, which provides member states with concrete actions to protect development gains from the risk of disaster.

“Decade-on-decade, deaths have gone down by 50 per cent in some countries, more for some hazards — quite a dramatic reduction, actually,” said Kishore, who is the special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

“Of course, we cannot take all of that progress for granted. We have to consolidate that progress,” he said as he addressed an event, titled “Accelerating resilient development through risk-informed investment in the Americas and the Caribbean”, which forms part of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, taking place in Switzerland until Friday.

Kishore said progress has been made on early warning systems, with 131 countries now having national-level plans and strategies for disaster risk reduction.

“That’s more than double the number of countries that have a national adaptation plan,” Kishore said.

“So, in our area of practice, there is real progress, but we are not making progress in saving livelihoods. [The] number of people affected, [the] number of houses destroyed is huge. [The] economic impact on some of the countries is enormous.”

The senior UN official said this was especially the case in small island developing states, a category of countries that includes those in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

He said that in 30 seconds on December 17, 2024, an earthquake destroyed 20 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, noting “so, if we have to make the next leap in disaster risk management, addressing the issues of financing is not something, it’s not an issue which we can sort of sidestep”.

“It is a central issue. If we have to deal with this platform as our now or never moment, in terms of giving a sense of urgency to the implementation of the Sendai Framework financing, discussion has to be central.

“And in that, I’m really pleased and very happy that the countries of the Americas and the Caribbean really take it seriously,” Kishore said, noting that finance ministers were present at the event.

“I have already had interaction with a group of finance ministers this morning, vice finance ministers, which means that in some ways, the Americas and the Caribbean are ahead of the curve.”

Kishore said that the discussion has gone beyond disaster risk management authorities to the ministries of finance, development and infrastructure planning.

He also referred to the Global Assessment Report 2025 that was launched on May 27.

“It talks about three downward spirals. One downward spiral is the downward spiral of debt for many countries, where before they have recovered from one event, another one happens, and there’s a downward spiral.”

There was also a downward spiral where many parts of countries were becoming uninsurable, Kishore said, adding that this was true even in advanced economies.

“Insurance companies are pulling out from there. And then, of course, there are countries where you basically have an impact, you respond, recover, you just keep doing that cycle without really coming out of it,” Kishore said, adding that this has “huge implications” for all aspects of development.

“Households that have accumulated just enough livelihood assets to come out of poverty are pushed back in.”

To illustrate, Kishore said that a poultry farm owner who has constructed a poultry farm without adequately considering disaster risks, then loses all the assets in just one hurricane and then takes years to recover from it.

“And if I talk specifically about the Latin American and the Caribbean region, CDRI (Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure) launched its report in October 2023. It assessed the annual average loss, and that was something like US$60 billion every year.”

Kishore said that while losses in these countries are significant portions of the country’s GDP, annual investment in disaster risk reduction is “really minuscule”, as little as 2.5 per cent of their annual budgets.

“So there is a widening gap between the rate at which the risk is accumulating and the rate at which we are investing in reducing that risk.”

Kishore said there are three things that must be done.

“We have to increase the money for disaster risk reduction. There is no getting around. There is no other way. And it is, irrespective of the level of development, the size of the economy.”

He said that smaller countries and those with less fiscal space can allocate smaller amounts.

“But if disaster risk is a problem, we have to set up systems, starting with systems of national budget, financial allocations, so that money flows into reducing risk,” Kishore said, even as he acknowledged that existing risk cannot be reduced overnight.

“If you have a stock of 2,563 bridges, and those bridges need to be strengthened, of course, you have to do risk assessment and prioritisation. You’re not going to strengthen all those 2,563 bridges overnight. But you know, surely you have to start with one.”

He further noted that the returns on disaster risk reduction might not be immediate, adding that this is unlike building a school and immediately seeing 500 children access education.

Kishore also made the point that it is important that investments in development projects, whether it is social infrastructure or large physical economic infrastructure, are informed by risk.

“It costs five per cent extra to make your infrastructure better, that should be there, but that really requires integrating analytics into the planning at the upstream level, but also at the level of projects.”

Kishore’s third point was that, “A lot of this stuff is, at a large scale, not at the project scale relatively new, so we have to have some sort of peer-to-peer exchange, learn from each other, in some cases, to achieve economies of scale.”

“It’s particularly true for small island developing nations where we have to look at it together, sort of have some sort of an integration, look at large pools of assets which we try to sort of reduce risks for.

“So, I think there has to be new imagination for the 21st century problems. We cannot solve these with only traditional approaches.”

Kishore said that this week’s discussion also included a ministerial panel on financing disaster risk reduction and that the draft outcome document for the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Spain from June 20 to July, talks about disaster risk reduction in a very prominent way.

“This was not the case two and a half months ago, so we’ve come a long way. We’ll make it a reality,” Kishore told the conference.