Disasters threaten to erode hard-won development gains and slow progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Vulnerable developing countries disproportionately bear the brunt of losses, facing repeated cycles of destruction and recovery that hinder poverty reduction, equality, and growth.
"Nothing erodes sustainable development like disasters, which can often destroy decades of progress in minutes. The failure to identify, prevent and reduce risks before they manifest as disasters not only places the Sustainable Development Goals in jeopardy, it affects the most vulnerable people in the world first and worst.
Amina J. Mohammed
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General
In today’s interconnected world, risk is increasingly systemic. A single hazard can cascade across systems—economic, social, environmental, and political—creating impacts that cross borders and generations. The UNDRR Strategic Framework 2026–2030 calls for an urgent shift toward risk-informed sustainable development, ensuring that disaster risk reduction (DRR) is embedded in all policies, investments, and decisions that shape our collective future.
Leaving no one behind is central to this vision. Advancing gender equality, disability inclusion, youth engagement, Indigenous knowledge, and addressing systemic discrimination are essential for building equitable and lasting resilience.
Meeting the challenges of a complex risk environment for sustainable development
Building a stronger understanding of risk in sustainable development
Disasters are not natural; they result from the interaction between hazards, vulnerability and exposure, compounded by weak coping capacities. Preventing hazards from becoming disasters requires identifying and addressing these fault lines before crises occur.
UNDRR supports countries in strengthening their risk knowledge through enhanced analytics, data systems, and partnerships across sectors. Better understanding of risk dynamics allows governments and communities to design anticipatory actions that protect lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems.
Risk-informed decisions and investments
Governance systems must use integrated and interdisciplinary approaches to manage complex risks. UNDRR works with governments to align national DRR strategies with broader sustainable development, financing, and climate policies, ensuring that disaster and climate risks are factored into all development decisions.
- DRR is fully mainstreamed into the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Frameworks, promoting coherence across UN country teams and national plans.
- National and local authorities are supported to apply risk-sensitive budget reviews, identify high-risk investments, and increase prevention-focused spending.
- The Comprehensive Risk Management (CRM) approach developed by UNDRR helps countries break silos between DRR, climate adaptation, and sustainable development, ensuring that risk reduction underpins every dimension of progress.
Better risk knowledge
A better understanding of the dynamic nature of risk is vital to achieving the SDGs. The increasing frequency and intensity of shocks call for the next generation of risk analytics to model cascading and systemic risks more accurately.
UNDRR promotes the development and use of multi-hazard risk tools, open-access data platforms, and collaborative approaches that bring together scientific research, local knowledge, and technology. These tools guide risk-informed investments and strengthen accountability in national and sectoral development plans.
Disaster risk reduction at the core of the Pact for the Future
The Pact for the Future – adopted by world leaders at the September 2024 Summit of the Future is the most comprehensive international agreement in decades. most comprehensive international agreement in decades. It offers new pathways for advancing DRR and resilience within the broader framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and beyond.
The Pact commits all Member States to promote a disaster-risk-informed approach to sustainable development at the local, national, regional, and global levels. It reinforces the importance of integrating risk reduction into policies, programmes, and investments across all sectors to safeguard people, the planet, and prosperity.
UNDRR acts as a trusted source of knowledge and a convener of partnerships to help governments and institutions translate the Pact’s commitments into measurable outcomes. By combining foresight, innovation, and collaboration, UNDRR supports countries to operationalize resilience as a driver of development.
Recommendations
To meet the Sustainable Development Goals, policymakers and development partners should:
- Shift from reaction to anticipation and prevention, integrating risk reduction into all sectors and levels of planning.
- Align DRR strategies with SDG implementation, ensuring coherence between economic, social, and environmental objectives.
- Invest in DRR across all levels, from community preparedness to national infrastructure resilience.
- Develop strategic foresight to anticipate emerging risks and guide transformational change.
- Foster inclusion and equity, ensuring that women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, and persons with disabilities are central to resilience-building.
Integrated reporting on SDG targets
The Sendai Framework and the SDGs are deeply interconnected. Monitoring under the Sendai Framework complements reporting on eleven SDG indicators across three goals:
- SDG 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
- SDG 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
- SDG 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
By aligning monitoring and reporting, countries can reduce duplication, increase policy coherence, and track how risk reduction accelerates achievement of the SDGs.
UNDRR’s Role: Partner for a Risk-informed 2030 Agenda
As the United Nations system’s focal point for DRR, UNDRR serves as a global leader, convener, and partner for action, helping countries build a risk-informed, inclusive, and sustainable future.
Through the Strategic Framework 2026–2030, UNDRR will:
- Strengthen risk knowledge and analytics for sustainable development planning.
- Support locally led resilience and inclusive decision-making.
- Scale up financing for DRR through budget tagging, investment tracking, and partnerships with IFIs and the private sector.
- Enhance recovery readiness to ensure that reconstruction builds forward better and supports long-term resilience.
Together with governments, UN agencies, civil society, and the private sector, UNDRR is working to ensure that the 2030 Agenda delivers not only progress, but protection—where no one is left behind, and every development gain is made to last.
Integrating risk reduction into the 17 sustainable development goals
No poverty
The Sendai Framework promotes social protection systems based on risk-informed early action programmes, social safety nets, livelihood advancement programmes and inclusive policies. Investment in DRR builds the resilience of households and communities to disasters, and prevents backsliding into poverty when disasters strike.
Sendai Targets A, B, C and E call for reductions in the impacts of disasters on people and in disaster-related economic losses, and improvements in DRR strategies – thereby reducing poverty.
Zero hunger
By transforming food systems, the agrifood sector can improve food production and security through comprehensive disaster and climate risk management and planning. Investing in crop insurance, climate-resilient food production systems, crop diversification including utilization of drought- and flood-tolerant crop varieties, and adoption of water and soil moisture conservation techniques can reduce risks to food security, and losses in productivity.
Good health and well-being
Health must be integrated into disaster risk management, and DRR into health planning, to secure human health – including mental health and well-being. Increase pandemic preparedness and response to enable early warning and manage diseases of the future. Investing in risk-informed health infrastructure and systems can minimize disruptions in access to health services and provide life-saving assistance.
Quality education
A holistic approach to reducing risks to the education sector includes DRR in school curricula at all levels. Sustainable development programmes should promote safe school environments, resilient infrastructure for education, and a multi-hazard perspective – including conflict and child protection issues – to reduce vulnerability and exposure.
Gender equality
Structural gender inequality is an underlying driver of risk, which DRR laws, policies, programmes and governance must address. Increase investment in gender-responsive disaster and climate risk management. By promoting and using sex-disaggregated data for systematic accounting of disaster losses we can improve risk knowledge for policymaking.
Clean water and sanitation
DRR strategies should be mainstreamed into rural and urban development planning, water management, preservation of ecosystems, and management of rivers, coastal flood plain areas, drylands, wetlands and all other areas prone to droughts and flooding. The robust and sustainable management of water resources reduces the impacts of water-related hazards.
Affordable and clean energy
Energy development programmes should promote a diverse, risk-informed energy mix including retrofitting or rebuilding existing infrastructure. They should foster a culture of maintenance to secure safe, reliable, affordable and clean electricity necessary for resilient societies and economies, and continuation of energy provision when hazards strike.
Decent work and economic growth
Risk-informed approaches should be pursued across sectors and policies, including in the agricultural, manufacturing and tourism sectors. Business behaviour needs to adopt risk reduction measures, including workplace safety. Industries that drive risk creation need to be replaced by those that create jobs, stimulate pro-poor growth, and build community resilience to hazards.
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Risk-informed policy, and investment decisions and systems – across all sectors, and particularly transportation, power, communications, water, health and education – should incorporate principles for resilient infrastructure, and nurture a culture of maintenance for resilient societies.
Reduced inequalities
Social safety nets must be integrated into livelihood-enhancement programmes to bolster households' and communities' resilience to disasters and displacement – in the design, financing and implementation of DRR policies and measures. Sectors and agendas should form a coherent way forward, particularly among least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing States affected by cycles of disaster and debt.
Sustainable cities and communities
Land-use policy and urban planning should mainstream DRR, local DRR strategies should be supported by relevant legislation, infrastructure regulations and risk-informed land-use planning, and multi-hazard urban risk assessments be updated to strengthen resilience – as supported in Making Cities Resilient 2030.
Sendai Targets A, B, C, D & E all promote more sustainable cities and communities.
Responsible consumption and production
Consumption and production patterns need to be re-orientated to prevent over-extraction of resources and environmental degradation. Risk-informed management of existing levels of waste – including technological waste – can help to prevent the creation of new risk.
Climate action
Climate change is one of the main drivers of risk. It is time to scale up risk-informed climate action to reduce vulnerability and exposure to disasters and evade maladaptation. Risk-informed planning, programmes and financing must be integrated, and comprehensive disaster and climate risk management must be promoted.
Sendai Targets A, B and E promote climate action as a means towards reducing disaster deaths and as a component of DRR strategies.
Life below water
Sustainable developments needs to include maritime nature-based solutions, ecosystem-based approaches for DRR, and risk-informed integrated coastal zone management. Stronger multi-hazard and impact-based early warning systems are needed to allow for anticipatory and early action to mitigate the risks of ocean-related hazards such as storm surges and tsunamis.
Life on land
We must scale up implementation of and investment in terrestrial nature-based solutions and ecosystem-based approaches for DRR, and step up efforts to tackle desertification, land degradation, erosion, drought, flooding and biodiversity loss.
Peace, justice and strong institutions
Peaceful and inclusive societies require improved capacity of State structures and social systems to commit to and scale up agile and comprehensive risk governance. Institutions must be enabled to prepare for and respond to disasters, to reduce humanitarian needs and strengthen trust in government. DRR can be built into programming across sectors, particularly in conflict areas. Stronger risk communication systems can provide timely access to adequate disaster risk information and engage citizens to think about resilience.
Partnerships for the goals
All of society must be engaged in DRR and a culture of risk reduction and resilience developed. This requires scaling up capacity-building for data collection and technology transfer. DRR financing strategies should be established across sectors for sustainable development, investment in prevention encouraged, and an evidence base for investment in DRR should be established. There must be stronger oversight of an overhauled regulatory environment, and new and innovative financing models need to be developed.
