The United Nations hopes to seal a global agreement on reducing the risks from extreme weather events, earthquakes and tsunamis at a 2015 summit in the Japanese city of Sendai.
The new deal, set up by the UN’s office for disaster risk reduction (UNISDR), is likely to focus heavily on climate change adaptation and resilience.
Environmental news website RTCC reports successful outcome from the March summit could lay the foundations for separate talks on a UN emissions reduction treaty, scheduled for Paris in December that year.
RTCC reports more than 8000 delegates including ministers and heads of state will attend the Sendai meeting.
UNISDR chief Margareta Wahlström said it would be a “rare opportunity to forge universal agreement on how to build disaster resilience across all sectors of society”.
In 2005 168 countries including the United States, China and European Union member states signed the Hyogo Framework, adopting a set of commitments to reduce vulnerabilities to natural hazards.
These include developing public awareness strategies, investing in early warning systems and building ‘resilient’ infrastructure.
RTCC reports while decisions taken at the UNISDR are not legally binding, they are seen as a sign of the growing political engagement of governments towards managing risk, and are credited with laying the foundations for climate adaptation strategies.
Deaths from natural disasters have decreased in the past two decades, although the economic costs from storms, typhoons, earthquakes and tsunamis have continued to rise.
Analysts from the Germanwatch Institute said losses linked to extreme weather events between 1993-2012 amounted to US$ 2.5 trillion.
Sonke Kreft, team leader at Germanwatch says a new agreement will have to “actively promote taking climate change seriously as an emerging risk.”
The Sendai summit is expected to build on the Hyogo Framework with a new set of specific targets and indicators related to national disaster risk reduction.
These are likely to feed into the UN climate talks, according to ActionAid’s Harjeet Singh.
“Most climate adaptation programs are based on the experiences of disaster risk reduction,” he told RTCC, stressing that while Hyogo was not legally binding it has “produced substantive results.”
An example is the use of early warning systems to alert populations to incoming storms or tidal waves.
One of the reasons Typhoon Pablo in 2012 is said to have claimed fewer lives than Typhoon Haiyan this year is the way areas hit by the former had invested in better and more extensive warning technologies.
Jerry Velasquez, the UNISDR’s head of Advocacy and Outreach said the destructive power of Haiyan demonstrated why a new agreement was important and hoped the outcomes of Sendai would encourage governments to see resilience as an economic opportunity.
Mr Velasquez said the March 2015 meeting was an opportunity to debate critical issues in a more comfortable environment, and a means of building momentum in what could be a defining year for UN efforts to promote green growth.
