Climate Change and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

This article reviews climate change within the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030(SFDRR), analyzing how climate change is mentioned in the framework’s text and the potential implications for dealing with climate change within the context of disaster risk reduction. Three main categories are examined. First,climate change affecting disaster risk and disasters,demonstrating too much emphasis on the single hazard driver and diminisher of climate change. Second, crosssectoral approaches, for which the SFDRR treads carefully,thereby unfortunately entrenching artificial differences and divisions, although appropriately offering plenty of support to other sectors from disaster risk reduction. Third,implementation, for which climate change plays a suitable role without being overbearing, but for which other hazard influencers should have been treated similarly. Overall, the mentions of climate change within the SFDRR put too much emphasis on the hazard part of disaster risk. Instead,within the context of the three global sustainable development processes that seek agreements in 2015, climate change could have been used to further support an allvulnerabilities and all-resiliences approach. That could be achieved by placing climate change adaptation as one subset within disaster risk reduction and climate change mitigation as one subset within sustainable development.

Climate Change’s Role in Disaster Risk Reduction’s Future:Beyond Vulnerability and Resilience

A seminal policy year for development and sustainability occurs in 2015 due to three parallel processes that seek long-term agreements for climate change, the Sustainable Development Goals, and disaster risk reduction.Little reason exists to separate them, since all three examine and aim to deal with many similar processes, including vulnerability and resilience. This article uses vulnerability and resilience to explore the intersections and overlaps amongst climate change, disaster risk reduction, and sustainability. Critiquing concepts such as 'return to normal'and 'double exposure'demonstrate how separating climate change from wider contexts is counterproductive. Climate change is one contributor to disaster risk and one creeping environmental change amongst many, and not necessarily the most prominent or fundamental contributor. Yet climate change has become politically important, yielding an opportunity to highlight and tackle the deep-rooted vulnerability processes that cause 'multiple exposure'to multiple threats. To enhance resilience processes that deal with the challenges, a prudent place for climate changewould be as a subset within disaster risk reduction. Climate change adaptation therefore becomes one of many processes within disaster risk reduction. In turn, disaster risk reduction should sit within development and sustainability to avoid isolation from topics wider than disaster risk. Integration of the topics in this way moves beyond expressions of vulnerability and resilience towards a vision of disaster risk reduction’s future that ends tribalism and separation in order to work together to achieve common goals for humanity.

Analyzing the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

On 11 March 2011,a massive,shallow earthquake off the east coast of Japan demonstrated the remarkable successes which that country has achieved in earthquake engineering.Building collapses tended to be mainly older structures while comparatively few deaths resulted from the shaking(including from landslides),illustrating how decades of initiatives and efforts in disaster risk reduction can reduce vulnerability,ensuring that a hazard does not