In 2015, the parallel development of the global agendas only led to limited alignment of the different agreements. The agendas are the result of negotiations of different specialist communities with their selective perception of global problems, their own priorities and their own technical jargon. Thus, the four agendas require different actions and commitments at national and local level to develop nationally appropriate measures, policies and strategies, e.g. for public investments. This necessitates cooperation between different ministries, but also between local government units as well as between national and local levels. At the same time, countries need to report on their progress with regard to each of the global agendas at an international level.
The situation described above potentially creates a significant additional burden: transaction costs are increased due to overlapping responsibilities and duplicated data collection and reporting. At the same time, countries incur tremendous opportunity costs when DRM is not considered in their national climate adaptation, urban development and economic and social development plans and policies. The observed segmentation of the global agendas is therefore triggering down by influencing national and local levels of governance.
GIDRM’s Approach:
Fostering practical coherence
The Global Initiative on Disaster Risk Management (GIDRM) wants to counteract this situation. Its goal: selected international and national, governmental and non-governmental actors will be supported in their ambition to achieve coherence between the Sendai Framework and the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as the 2030 Agenda and the New Urban Agenda, with regard to planning, implementing and reporting on DRM.
While the UN is addressing the coherence challenge through common strategies and cooperation between UN-bodies, German development cooperation is aiming to support from the "bottom-up". National and sub-national examples of successful agenda-coherence will be presented on regional platforms. The examples will then be introduced as regional recommendations at inter-national conferences to be confirmed as regional good practices.
The Global Initiative is working in Latin America/Caribbean and Asia/Pacific, focusing on two pilot countries that are vulnerable but possess the necessary institutional capacities and an established development cooperation portfolio that can be built upon: Mexico and the Philippines.
Pilot country: the Philippines
The Government of the Philippines will be supported in its efforts to harmonize risk-assessment approaches and planning guidelines of different ministries that have to be used by the local government units. So far, the already resource weak municipalities and local government units are expected to coordinate all the different requirements related to urban- and spatial planning, economic development, civil protection and climate change and the underlying requirements stated in the global agendas. This leads to a lack of orientation and work overload.
Based on a clear prioritization of measures, improved planning will be translated into improved local project proposals that give equal consideration to climate and disaster risks (e.g. in public building codes) and can then be financed through budgets that do not focus solely on one of the topics.
Pilot country: Mexico
In Mexico, the GIDRM is advising the Office of the President on how to integrate the requirements of the Sendai Framework into the national sustainability strategy. The Ministry of Finance intends to incorporate DRM and climate adaptation measures more systematically into its processes for structuring, preparing and assessing public investment projects, and is being supported in this by the project.
The GIDRM is assisting in the development of methodologies and processes for a) prioritizing the projects that require an in-depth disaster risk analysis, and b) integrating risk mitigation and climate change adaptation measures into the prioritized projects.
These and other practices are introduced by partner governments at regional level:
in the Latin American/Caribbean Network of National Investment Authorities,
in the Asian Regional Consultative Committee on Disaster Management,
at regional events of UNISDR, such as the biennial ministerial conference for disaster risk reduction in Asia and Latin America.