Letters from Sendai no. 1: a turning point for climate risk?

The Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction ran in Sendai, Japan, from 14 to 18 March 2015. Swenja Surminski of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics dated the opening letter of the ENHANCE series 14 March, and it was posted on 15 March. Eight more followed over the week.

She framed 2015 as a possible turning point for managing climate risk, because three processes were due to land in the same year: the Sendai conference in March, the new global development goals in September and the climate talks in Paris at the end of the year. The setting added weight. The conference took place near the area hit by the Fukushima disaster four years earlier, and it was expected to agree a successor to the Hyogo Framework for Action.

The letter singled out one imbalance. Prevention is chronically underfunded compared with relief, and Surminski cited an Australian ratio of about 1 dollar spent on prevention for every 10 spent on recovery.

More than 5,000 officials from over 160 countries attended, according to the letter. ENHANCE partners planned to share findings on four subjects across the week:

• insurance;
• partnerships;
• the economics of disaster risk reduction;
• risk assessment.

The next letter took up the last of these (Letters from Sendai no. 2). The full set is listed in the series overview, and the framework the conference produced is summarised in the glossary.