UNISDR head Mami Mizutori told the opening of AMCDRR that extreme weather events are driving disaster displacement in the region

By Patrick Fuller

ULAANBAATAR, 4 July 2018 - The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, brought the issue of forced displacement as a result of disasters to the fore on the opening day of the Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.

“Last year, extreme weather events were largely responsible for displacing almost 19 million people around the world. Asia is the most disaster prone region in the world and accounted for almost half this number,” he told the Conference in a video message yesterday from UN HQ in New York. 

It was a theme taken up by his special representative and head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Mami Mizutori, who described the problem as “acute.”

“Looking at the Asia-Pacific region, around 8.6 million people in East Asia and Pacific and 2.8 million in South Asia fled within their own countries to escape the impacts of disasters in 2017.”

“Sudden onset disasters, mostly linked to weather-related hazards like floods and storms, accounted for the vast majority of these new displacements in the region,” Mz. Mizutori said in her keynote speech to the Conference

A regional consultation process was launched yesterday on new guidelines to encourage inclusion of disaster displacement reduction in strategies to implement the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the global plan for reducing the numbers of people affected by disasters.

The public consultative version of the guide, is available on the UNISDR web site, PreventionWeb through this link Disaster Displacement: How to reduce risk, address impacts and strengthen resilience

The guide is a collaboration led by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and funded by the Government of Germany, in support of efforts by the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) to ensure that future disaster risk reduction strategies include disaster displacement risk as set out in the Sendai Framework.

The German Federal Foreign Office, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, UN Migration Agency (IOM), and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and UNISDR were among the members of the working group.

A recent World Bank report projects that without concrete climate and development action, in South Asia alone, more than 40 million people could be forced to move within their countries to escape the slow-onset impacts of climate change.