Building inclusive resilience for all

A gender, age, disability, and cultural perspective should be integrated into all policies and practices, including an emphasis on promoting women and youth leadership.

UNDRR’s work on inclusion ensures that disaster risk reduction (DRR) is rooted in equality, human rights, and the lived realities of diverse groups. Disasters do not affect everyone equally. They amplify existing inequalities linked to gender, age, disability, income, and other factors. Recognising and addressing these intersecting risks and vulnerabilities are essential to build resilient, inclusive, and just societies in the face of rising climate and disaster challenges.

Through the Sendai Gender Action Plan (Sendai GAP), UNDRR supports governments and partners to integrate gender and disability inclusion across DRR policies, strategies, and systems. The GAP provides a practical, rights-based framework that embeds the principles of equality, non-discrimination, participation, and accountability into every phase of disaster risk management — from data collection and risk assessment to recovery and reconstruction.

The Sendai GAP calls on Member States to:

• Address intersectionality to ensure that risk policies reflect how multiple and overlapping factors, such as gender, disability, age, and socio-economic background, shape people’s vulnerabilities and exposure to and recovery from disasters.
• Align with human rights frameworks by operationalising key international standards, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discriminiation against Women (CEDAW), particularly General Recommendation No. 37 and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to uphold equality, inclusion and participation in DRR.
• Foster inclusive governance to promote engagement and leadership of women, organisations of persons with disabilities (OPDs), and other civil society actors in shaping and monitoring DRR policy and decision making.

Mainstreaming the Sendai GAP is not only about promoting gender equality, it is a pathway to embed disability inclusion and human rights, ensuring that no one is left behind in disaster risk reduction. UNDRR is embedding these principles across its Strategic Framework 2026–2030 and Work Programme 2026–2027, working with countries and partners to develop inclusive data systems, accountability mechanisms, and leadership opportunities that advance a more equitable and resilient world for all.

Themes

Children and Youth

Empowering young people is the world’s best chance of building resilient communities as they comprise the largest and most interconnected generation in history. Yet, young people are particularly vulnerable to disasters. Contributing as powerful change actors and resilience-builders, young people must be part of disaster risk reduction action

Disability Inclusion

Persons with disabilities are often disproportionally affected by disasters and have different and uneven levels of resilience and capacity to recover. Many are socially or logistically isolated and lack access to evacuation warnings and appropriate transportation for themselves, for those who care for them and any medical equipment necessary for their well-being.

Gender

Women, girls, boys, men, and people of diverse gender identities have distinct vulnerabilities in each context that shape the way that they experience and recover from disaster impacts. Effective disaster risk reduction requires meaningful and diverse participation, engagement and leadership, through an inclusive and accessible, all-of-society approach.

Women's Leadership

Women’s participation in decision-making is enshrined in international human rights frameworks including the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, yet there is still great disparity in the number of women playing a leadership role in disaster risk management.

Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous Peoples are on the front line of rapidly increasing disaster risk and climate change and environmental degradation because of their close relationship with the environment and its resources. While they are the holders of the traditional knowledge enabling better understanding of hazards, they are also the one disproportionally affected by disasters. It's time to change that - we are launching a new campaign to promote the change.

Social Development and Disaster Risk Reduction

The Second World Summit for Social Development (WSSD) Political Declaration (2025) identified disaster risk reduction (DRR) as a cross-cutting pillar of inclusive and sustainable social development, essential for eradicating poverty, promoting equality, and safeguarding human well-being in an era of escalating risks.

Vulnerability

Vulnerability is the human dimension of disasters and is the result of the range of economic, social, cultural, institutional, political and psychological factors that shape people’s lives and the environment that they live in. 

More about vulnerability

Disaggregated data

Sendai Framework Monitor (SFM) Sex, Age and Disability Disaggregated Data (SADDD)

To better understand how disasters impact different members of a community, the Sendai Framework calls for “the open exchange and dissemination of disaggregated data, including by sex, age and disability”. To date, many challenges hinder the collection of disaggregated data such as additional costs, time and resources, data privacy concerns, and outdated data infrastructure. 

View the publication on SADDD

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