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VIEWS FROM THE FRONTLINE

Key advocacy messages

100,000 Perceptions of Risk – Global Recommendations Report

Introduction

Following on from the practical recommendations mapped out, we asked GNDR members in the global south to reflect on the Views from the Frontline conclusions and the progress – or lack of – in achieving the targets set out in 2015 in the Sendai Framework.

Here, communities on the front line of risk shared eight recurrent advocacy messages. GNDR urges all stakeholders to champion these advocacy messages at the local, national, regional and global level.

The key issues highlighted included the need for:

  1. Systemic analysis to deal with complex disasters, including conflict and climate change 
  2. Localisation
  3. Accessible funds and information
  4. Strengthened governance systems
  5. Equal participation of women and youth in decision making processes 

Within this eight specific advocacy messages have been developed:

1. Listen to communities

  • Our primary call is to listen to the community, to those on the front line of risk, the first responders; those living in communities on the front line of risk have the local knowledge, expertise, and capacity to significantly strengthen risk governance in policy and practice
  • Meaningfully include local leaders in the implementation and monitoring of the Sendai Framework
  • Institutionalise including community voice, knowledge and recommendations in decision making; avoid tokenistic inclusion and empower local voice to lead decision making
  • Promote the analysis of the systemic nature of risk and risk-informed development from the perspective of the communities most at risk; within this, promote local knowledge, nature-based solutions and ecosystem protection

2. Invest at the local level

  • Prioritise making sure risk reduction finance (both public and private) reaches the local level
  • Hold both national governments and donor states accountable for making sure finance reaches the local level
  • Empower and finance locally-led, grassroots action for risk reduction
  • Include local leaders in decision making spaces at local, national, and global levels
  • Meaningfully include local leaders in deciding how risk reduction budgets are spent at the local level
  • Listen to local voices on how climate change is a super driver of risk and integrate climate-related hazards and their impacts in local DRR planning; integrate both mitigation and adaptation in risk reduction planning
  • Prioritise prevention and empower local-level leaders to adopt nature-based solutions

3. Improve coordination and coherence: enable civil society to lead the coordination and coherence required for risk-informed development

  • Recognise the systemic nature of risk and adopt a coherent approach across all global frameworks for effective risk-informed development, risk reduction and resilience building for communities most at risk
  • Recognise the role that civil society organisations have to lead collaboration; accept and strengthen the role of local CSOs in convening an all-of-society approach to effectively achieve the Sendai Framework commitments
  • Specifically utilise the capacity civil society organisations and networks have to collect and disseminate two-way knowledge exchanges
  • Support civil society organisations to work with government delegations on integrating DRR road maps and national adaptation plans
  • Link DRR decision making to climate change negotiations, specifically to loss and damage, and the need for the global north to increase financial support to the global south
  • Incorporate the understanding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Report into the strategy for implementing the second half of the Sendai Framework for Action
  • Strengthen the harmonisation of all 2030 agendas and in particular work to meaningfully integrate risk-informed development across the Sendai Framework, the Paris Agreement, and the Sustainable Development Goals

4. Empower women leaders: Recognise and tackle gender inequality as a driver of risk

  • Recognise gender inequality as a barrier to achieving the Sendai Framework targets and invest in action to meaningfully tackle gender inequality for strengthened disaster risk reduction
  • Empower women leaders to meaningfully engage in disaster risk reduction at all levels
  • Recognise paragraph 36[6] in the Sendai Framework that focuses on inclusion and the barriers that persist to the meaningful inclusion of women at all levels of risk reduction decision making in both policy and practice

5. Strengthen DRR governance in conflict affected states

  • Those on the front line of disaster risk in fragile states specifically call on the global community to implement risk governance
  • Support conflict-affected and fragile states to implement disaster risk reduction governance, policy, and plans
  • Invest in understanding which conflict-affected states do not meaningfully include DRR governance; understand the barriers and identify solutions
  • Specifically understand how risk reduction finance can reach the local level in fragile states and what the international community needs to do to ensure this happens

6. Involve children and youth in disaster risk reduction

  • Recognise the importance of multi-generational action for risk reduction
  • Reflect on paragraph 36 of the Sendai Framework and understand why young people feel that they are not yet meaningfully included in decision making and work to address this
  • Meaningfully include children and youth leaders in all levels of disaster risk reduction decision making and continue to prioritise education on risk reduction and resilience

7. Learn from Covid-19

  • Understand and address the weakness in governance that Covid-19 demonstrated
  • Recognise the specific failures of risk governance and increase the number of UN Member States equipped with quality multi-stakeholder DRR governance body/arrangements that include civil society representation and adequately reflects all parts of society
  • Learn from the social, economic and political elements of risk reduction highlighted by the pandemic
  • Include biological disasters, such as pandemics in the Sendai Framework going forward
  • Work to ensure everyone has access to the Covid-19 vaccine

8. Integrate inclusion across all levels. Transition from seeing inclusion as a standalone topic

  • Recognise the intersectional dynamics of marginalisation in relation to risk
  • Recognise paragraph 36 in the Sendai Framework that focuses on inclusion and understand why inclusion is not felt to have been successfully mainstreamed across all areas of the Sendai Framework
  • Meaningfully integrate inclusion across all areas of the Sendai Framework
Reflections and conclusions
Next chapter
100,000 Perceptions of Risk
Contents

Project funded by

European Union

Our Views from the Frontline project is funded by the European Union (EU). Content related to this project on our website was made possible by the support of the EU. All content is the sole responsibility of GNDR and does not necessarily reflect the views of the EU.

Photos

Top: Photo by Asad Photo Maldives.

Above: Image by Asian Development Bank.