Rising global instability, mounting geopolitical tensions, and threats to multilateralism are deepening economic uncertainty, increasing polarization, and widening inequalities. Development and humanitarian budgets are shrinking, while many low- and middle-income countries struggle with high post-COVID-19 debt and stalled progress on poverty reduction. At the same time, disaster risk is rising, driven by climate change, rapid urbanization, ecosystem decline, and other factors that place more people, livelihoods, and assets in harm’s way.
In this challenging context, disaster risk reduction offers a solution. By addressing overlapping crises under a unified agenda, DRR provides a proactive approach to identifying, reducing, and managing risks before they escalate into disasters.
The evidence is clear: investments in risk reduction are far more cost-effective than responding after disaster strikes. Every US$1 invested in making infrastructure resilient in low-and medium-income countries saves US$4 in avoided losses and disruptions. Yet for every US$100 of official development assistance between 2010 and 2019, only 50 cents went to protecting development from disasters. Closing this gap is urgent: resilience is not only financially sound, it is essential to safeguard lives and development.
Four catalytic areas
Through the Strategic Framework 2026–2030, UNDRR has sharpened its focus on four catalytic areas:
- Risk knowledge – fostering an open, interoperable and AI-enabled risk information ecosystem to generate, share and institutionalize actionable insights.
- Locally-led DRR – institutionalizing and financing resilience at local level, and empowering communities, local governments and other stakeholders to drive disaster risk reduction efforts.
- Financing for DRR –integrating disaster risk reduction into public financial management and investment decisions across public and private sectors, while mobilizing domestic resources and private capital for DRR and risk-informed investments.
- Recovery readiness – strengthening governance, pre-arranged financing, and institutional capacity for post-disaster recovery, ensuring that resilient, risk-informed recovery becomes the global norm.
Our measurable impact
Disaster mortality rates have halved over the last decade thanks to better governance and early warning systems
More than 130 Member States now report having national DRR strategies, with growing numbers of local strategies.
More than 60 per cent of all countries – and over half in every region – now report having multi-hazard early warning systems (MHEWS), more than double the number of countries that reported having them in 2015.
More than 600 local governments and municipalities in more than 60 countries and territories have begun implementing disaster risk reduction strategies, while another 540 are currently developing their plans through the Making Cities Resilient 2030 Initiative.
Key documents
About UNDRR
