UNDRR Private Sector Alliance for Disaster Resilient Societies (ARISE) Annual General Meeting

SRSG: ARISE AGM OPENING

 

14 May 2019, 9.00 – 12.30

Rooms 7/8, CICG

OPENING REMARKS

 

Dear ARISE members, I have been in this job for about 1 year and 3 months, and the role of the private sector has been a repeating key area of discussion and work since. It is therefore it is an immense pleasure to be here today with you. Your interest and commitment are the recipe for the successful collaboration which we need to build to achieve the Sendai Framework and risk-sensitive investment. Let me outline what we face today:

We see the extraordinary planetary scale change: climate change happening faster and more severely than we anticipated, resulting among other in a series of extreme events hitting communities across the globe; biodiversity loss is threatening the natural balance on our planet with unknown but certainly scary consequences; record displacement numbers, food insecurity, political instability and rising instances of protracted crisis and slow onset disasters are further complicating the picture of today and are threatening our future.

Against this picture, our understanding of risk, disaster risk and complex risk is maturing, including with the help of new technologies.

Yet, as reflected in the Global Assessment Report which will be launched tomorrow, Governments and practitioners still and with urgency need to move beyond a sectoral and siloed approach to disaster risk to consider the pluralistic nature of risk: in multiple dimensions, at multiple scales and with multiple impacts. We need to change the way how we – as governments, as communities, private sector representatives and individuals – understand our relationship with risk and its reduction. We need to adopt a broader systems-approach to disaster risk reduction which reaches across the aisles, breaks down silos and encourages cross-sectoral and long-term engagement.

This week, here at the Global Platform, we look at the status of the implementation of the Sendai Framework with special emphasis on the 2020 Target (e) - Substantially increase the number of countries with national and local disaster risk reduction strategies by 2020 and the role of all of us to accelerate action for resilience.

Though we see progress, there is a clear call for more comprehensive DRR strategies across scales, linking DRR, climate change, development and related financing strategies and plans. Importantly, these strategies must be designed in ways that genuinely internalize the full socio-economic contexts in a country and with a comprehensive, all-of-society approach.

Here is the good news: Resilience is part of almost all ongoing discussions at the global, regional and national levels. At the global policy level, Member States are discussing Financing for Development incl the review of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, review of the SIDS ACCELERATED MODALITIES OF ACTION (S.A.M.O.A) Pathway, High level Political Forum on SDGs (HLPF), SDG Summit and UN Climate Action Summit.

And what is clearly recognized throughout these discussions is that though Governments must be in the lead, they cannot do it in isolation. In particular the private sector is a critical partner as a major investor and part of our systems and societies in any country.

Private sector is therefore widely acknowledged and sought for as a key partner for Governments and the UN and other international organizations to achieve risk-informed sustainable development. Among other, the UN Reform, championed by the UN Secretary-General, places a strong focus on how UN can better engage the private sector.

UNISDR, what is now UNDRR, has worked with the private sector for over 8 years now. ARISE has been built based on common experiences and lessons learned overtime, including from the negotiations towards the Sendai Framework, where our business partners played a key role in ensuring private sector is well reflected.

And ARISE has already had some very good successes, as summarized in the ARISE Round-up which you can find in your briefing pack. To pick only a few, ARISE Philippines, under leadership by SM Prime, has conducted annual disaster risk reduction Forums which led to the formation of a “National Resilience Center”. The fourth annual ARISE Japan Public Symposium brought together businesses, Governments and other partners under the theme: “DRR and the Private Sector in the SDGs Era: From Information to Communication”. ARISE members in the US and Brazil and elsewhere developed, updated and applied the Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities as an innovative resilience assessment tool, and issued a small business resilience assessment tool. ARISE Member CEMEX is leading an initiative to promote business practices that build resilience along the value chain, raise awareness for risk-informed business investment and encourage the development of policies and practices.

We would like to use this AGN to build on these successes to define concrete action for 2019 -2020 for impact on the ground.

As a first step, together with ARISE members, we have refocused and reshaped the goals and structure of ARISE over the past months, as reflected in the new ARISE Terms of Reference.

As Martha will brief you on, we are also in process to develop a new ARISE Communications strategy, including aligning and strengthening the existing and creating new ARISE networks.

In terms of concrete action, there are a lot of opportunities for ARISE. This includes the two topics of this afternoons’ sessions, on incentivizing risk-informed investment and enhancing the resilience of micro-small and medium businesses. The topics not only reflect the important role the private sector plays as the major investor in any country when we look at the over 200 trillion USD expected to be invested in new infrastructure over the coming decades. They also reflect the fact that MSMEs are on the one hand particularly vulnerable to disasters, with up to 60% of MSMEs not reopening after a disaster even in developed regions such as Europe. Yet, on the other hand, MSMEs represent over 80% of any national economy and therefore could have a huge leveraging power for more risk-sensitive investment and decision making, not least due to their role in innovation for new approaches to risk.

To tackle these challenges clearly requires us to look closely into the enabling business environment, which again can only be done in close collaboration between policy makers, the private sector and its regulators.

In this regard, as you will hear later today, there is also opportunities for ARISE in linking closer to other private sector networks and associations, such as the UN Global Compact, the International Chambers of Commerce (ICC) which is acting as the official representative of business in the UN discussions on the 2030 Agenda, as well as the World Economic Forum and Connecting Business Initiative (CBI).

Let me close by highlighting that effective engagement for impact can be achieved through various angles: engagement in global and regional policy discussions, collaboration with the public sector at the national and local level to help build enabling business environments through policies and regulatory frameworks, and concrete action such as development of evidence, capacity building and integration of risk-sensitive business management practice.

I and my colleagues at UNDRR look forward to working closely with ARISE members to enhance the implementation of risk-informed business investment for resilience societies across the globe.

I look forward to our discussions.

Thank you.

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