Letters from Sendai: the complete series

The Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction took place in Sendai, Japan, from 14 to 18 March 2015. ENHANCE partners joined official sessions, side events and informal discussions on disaster risk reduction in Europe, insurance, the economics of risk reduction and the value of partnerships. On 23 March 2015 the nine letters they wrote during the week were brought together, and a compiled PDF gathered all nine with a reflection on the targets of the Sendai Framework 2015-2030.

Read in order, the series follows the conference from hope to disappointment. The first letter asked whether 2015 would be a turning point for climate risk management. By the ninth, the same group of authors was writing that none of the seven targets set a quantitative degree of progress.

The middle letters are the most useful as reference. They set out positions ENHANCE held throughout the project: that insurance only encourages risk reduction if a scheme is designed for it from the start, that avoided losses are too narrow a case for investment, and that risk assessment should begin from the questions its users ask.

Two letters stand apart from the rest. The sixth, by Jaroslav Mysiak, was written from inside a deadlock, and the eighth, by Annegret Thieken, spends half its length on disaster loss data in Europe, a subject the other letters leave aside. The Sendai Framework itself is summarised in the glossary.