2021 International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction - Disrupting for a Safer World

Wisdom dictates that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result defines insanity.?

In developed nations, there are some outstanding disaster management practices.?However, we certainly cannot claim to have an infallible approach to managing where humanity and extreme nature events intersect – the events we call natural disasters.

There is much ground to be made up and much innovation to adopt before even the first world can claim genuine resilience to natural disasters.?So, while we can import current practice into the developing world and potentially have some positive impact, it is not simply a ‘lift and shift’ proposition.?We can, and should, do better!

International partnerships for developing countries

The Global community should be so grateful to the UNDRR, and the 2021 International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction gives us an opportunity to both reflect on what improvements we need and to give thanks for what we already have.?

Specifically, the focus of this year’s IDDRR is on Target (f): “Substantially enhance international cooperation to developing countries through adequate and sustainable support to complement their national actions for implementation of the present Framework by 2030.”

A model that seeks the successful application of developed world solutions into developing nations also assumes many attributes and things are in place or are possible: effective political and organisational structures, infrastructure, data availability and distribution channels, analytical capacity, to name just a few.?Reality dictates that many of these things are not in place in many countries.

Many innovations are now directly and indirectly relevant to disaster management.?These innovations tend not to follow traditional hierarchies or rely solely on traditional inputs and infrastructure.?Like much 21st-century innovation, static inputs are becoming more and more redundant as data and inputs are democratised and found to be more accurate, dynamic and reflective of real-time.?For any disaster manager, the triumvirate of accurate, dynamic and on time is the future state of dreams.

A global change for humanity

The roadmap to genuine game-changing results is then to do something sane – i.e., something different.?If the developed world truly wants to make a global change that benefits all humanity it must think differently.?The world is constantly being disrupted, yet some disaster management practices still rely on outdated technology.

Something different means disaster managers adopting, trialling, and adapting innovation.?Yes, caution is required because failure can have catastrophic consequences. But we must remember that the choice to do nothing, particularly in the face of increasing disasters, also carries a cost. A cost to the global economy and to human life.??Testing innovative solutions alongside traditional methods present a low-risk environment and opportunity for due diligence which leads to innovation while protecting from downside risk.?Disruptors are agile and quick to pivot when the solution does not prove the hypothesis.?Learning from failure is valuable and inevitably leads to the next game-changers in technology for a safer future.?

Developed countries can then improve their own ability to create genuine resilience through all phases of disaster management.?By proving out technologies that are not dependent on massive, fixed infrastructure and costly standing capacity.?These technologies can then be delivered in circumstances more readily applicable to developing countries.????

Leadership and courage are required to trial and test innovation – the cost is small.?Investment can then be planned for the solutions that work and can scale.?Proven technologies can then become ubiquitous and accessible to developing counties.?

A safer future

In the future, we will see the disruptors, and those with the vision to support them, becoming the principal enablers of the Sendai Seven. At FloodMapp we are working with innovative disaster managers to make a substantial difference to each of the Sendai targets.

• reducing disaster mortality;
• reducing the numbers of people disaster-affected;
• reducing direct economic losses;
• reducing damage to critical infrastructure.

The targets for achieving these reductions in disaster losses are:

• increasing the number of national and local strategies for disaster risk reduction;
• enhancing international cooperation to developing countries; and
• ?boosting the availability of, and access to, multi-hazard early warning systems.

That means less death, less damage, less suffering, and real social and economic resilience. Like everyone else in the innovation/disruption space, we just need the chance to change the world for the better. Let’s model some radical sanity. Let’s be different, and better, together. Then global change for the better is not a target, it’s reality.?