I’ve been fortunate, and privileged, to spend the week in Geneva at the UNDRR hosted  8^th Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction. Each four years governments, stakeholders, and practitioners come together to review progress towards achieving the goals of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. These are large scale affairs with people from all over the globe. This was my third UN Conference, having been to Sendai, as well as the regional conference in Brisbane. This makes up the trifecta.

Being in Geneva was also a nice touch for me. I last visited in 1974 to visit my Aunt, who lived here working for the UN organising conferences like the one I was attending. I remember little of it, other than the Jet d’eau, and the wide streets.

The program is broad and ranges from high level dialogues between governments and key international agencies, through to more technical sessions exploring issues, as well as workshop type events. You have to remember this, because some of the sessions are governments stating what their progress in DRR is, rather than exploration of issues, or sharing new knowledge.

It felt much smaller than previous UN meetings I have been to, although they said 3400 people attended. Perhaps it was the conference venue which was an 80s Brutalist affair, with many nooks and crannies, and no real straight lines between A and B. I also had the feeling that the global aid cuts are hitting hard. Many people said their delegations were smaller. Many nations appear to be directing funding towards a military build up, which is a sobering thought on many counts.

The first session I attended was the system risk/polycrisis session, and it was great.It had a range of speakers from government to academia, to think tank to NGO. Brendan Moon , the NEMA Coordinator General, talked about Australia’s National Coordination Mechanism, the systemic approach to coordinating the consequences of disaster. It was interesting and well received. An interesting comment was made by Jeffrey Schegelmilch from Columbia University where he said public health is a combination of medical science, social science, and political science. This was made in response to a discussion around not having rally learned from COVID. There was a good discussion about lessons not learned. Ruth Richardson (no relation) from the Accelerator for Systemic Risk was impressive, as she laid out the issues around uncertainty and how we must grapple with this. One thing she said was that we all don’t know how to do this, so lets do it together. Katherine Sotomayor from Mexico’s Major Group for Children and youth reminded us that social impacts are a big driver of risk for communities, and the impacts can be intergenerational.

The second session I attended was one on Governance for disaster risk reduction. As it was a high level dialogue,  I didn’t particularly learn anything from that session. Most of the speakers talked about the need for a long term approach, for governance to be embedded locally through to national levels, and that for governance to recognise and address inequality. Nothing that we already don’t know, but perhaps need to focus on more.

I attended a great side event organised by the Geneva Science Policy Interface. I liked the way they set it up, as they put questions on the high tables should we find nothing in common to talk about. But we all did. There were broad ranging discussions on biological weapons control, medical sociology, the role of place connection underpinning our work.

Day 2 was very similar. I attended an interesting session on data first up. It was very focussed on loss and damage data. All the speakers seemed to be focussed on the short term, ie lets collect data to find out what happened. None really made the connection of if we really understand the impacts, we can factor this into our models and decisionmaking for DRR. Still, there were some interesting thoughts. There was a pertinent reminder that risk models are only as good as the data that goes into them. There was good discussion about technology and not to be blinded by big and shiny. The panellists remarked that in their countries they needed their technology to be low cost and readily available. In the Philippines they are using data from 16 major events to use to train AI to predict losses from potential cyclone/flood events. Manu Gupta from SEEDS india talked about scale. When you have 100million people affected by floods, you need a different way of collecting data. They have been focussed more on citizen science initiatives. This was echoed by China as well.

I made it to one of the learning labs, on wildfire and drought preparedness in Switzerland. A bit niche, yes, but it was run by the fabulous Christine Eriksen, the former Wollongong Uni researcher now working in Switzerland. It is really interesting to see that they recognise fire and drought as an increasing issue for them. They are at the start of this journey, but have developed a forest fire danger index. They don’t have categories yet, from what I can tell. It was a great workshop, and I had a bit to add.

The Extreme Heat Governance session was really good. It had some very heavy hitters, moderated by the Global Heat Health Information Network, and with the Secretary General of the Red Cross, a senator from Canada, the principal adviser to the Indian Prime Minister, the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organisation, the French climate  change ambassador, the ILO the head of the Pan African Meteorological service, and the special representative for DRR. There was a lot frank and robust exchange. The WMO told us that 10 ten times last year, the daily temperature exceeded 50C. The ILO said that there were 19,000 deaths in workplaces last year relating to heat, and 8 million injuries. 8-10% of the deaths occurred outside periods declared as heatwaves. There was also the recognition from the Food and Agriculture Organisation that 12% of food is lost to extreme heat. There was a strong call for extreme heat to be included in all risk governance systems. At the moment, it largely sit outside of governance. This needs to across all sectors. Kamal Kishore pointed out that extreme heat is entirely predictable, so deaths should be entirely avoidable and this is what we needed to be working towards from the next extreme heat season.

I also went to an ignite stage presentation on Messy Maps, which looked at ways of including different sorts of social information on GIS. It was fascinating the way that they incorporated video and audio stories into maps. Really powerful tools.

Day 3 had an excellent learning lab exploring the new Global Assessment Report (I am a huge fan of the GARs, they are fantastic explorations of critical issues). GAR2025 no different, being one on the true costs of disasters. I particularly enjoyed the session from GFDRR on the wellbeing costs of disaster. They have developed a model (similar to what we did with the Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience) that incorporates the wellbeing impacts of disaster (health, loss of income, loss of natural environment). They found that the wellbeing costs are double that of infrastructure and built environment costs.

The session on the use of Foresight in DRR was more of a speed dating session, with presenters outlining how they were using frontier technologies to be thinking about the future. It was hard to learn much from this session, other than to flagpost practices. Much seemed to revolve around AI and Large Language Models. There was little around the use of scenarios to test thinking and prompt strategic planning.

The session on the Sendai Gender Action Plan, chaired by the legendary Maureen Fordham, with opening remarks from Kamal Kishore, was excellent. Kamal made the observation when women are involved in risk governance, it improves and losses are reduced. It was interesting then when the participants in the room were asked on what they thought priorities should be, this involving women in risk governance rated much lower than disaggregating data. Progress is slow, but underway, to implement the plan globally. There was a strong focus on capacity building and awareness raising among the whole DRR system. The issues of trans women in Pakistan was also highlighted.

The final closing session was a reminder of what we had achieved in DRR, halving of the mortality rates from disasters. But is was also a reminder there was a lot to do. DRR needs to be embedded in everyone’s governance, planning, and budgets. DRR also takes place, and will be successful in towns and villages and suburbs, rather than nations, because that’s where people live.

Its been an exhausting few days, constantly on, listening, thinking, talking, catching up with old friends and colleagues. This wasn’t helped by not being able to sleep well given my hotel was in the red light area of Geneva (the so called “benefits” of booking late when there are two major UN conferences  in town) and a 24hour bar was beneath my window ! Off to Paris now on a very fast train to the Accelerator for System Risk Assessment’s workshop on their STEER tool, an assessment tool for systemic risk. assessment.