This briefing assesses trends in disaster deaths, economic losses and the impact of disasters on poverty to help Open Working Group (OWG) members to formulate targets that are both politically acceptable and technically robust. Accordingly it recommends returning to a DRM target under Goal 1 as follows: ‘By 2030, strengthen disaster risk management systems, reduce disaster deaths by x% and reduce economic, physical and social disaster impacts by y%’.
Reducing disaster losses is a fundamental component of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), demonstrated by the presence of targets relating to disaster risk management (DRM) under six goals in the ‘zero draft’ (2 June 2014). However, few of the proposed DRM targets are concise or easily measurable; they do not build on existing international datasets or focus on whether disaster losses are actually being reduced
Disaster deaths and economic losses are among the most widely collected information about disaster impacts. Existing international datasets highlight considerable variations between countries depending on their level of economic development and hazard exposure, although progress regionally and globally can be assessed. Targets differentiated around these determinants may indeed be desirable. Experience shows that it is possible to achieve much larger reductions in disaster mortality than in economic losses.
Data challenges include deciding which events should be counted (for example, does a flood killing one person and destroying one house count?) and how to measure progress in disaster resilience when large-scale events, like big earthquakes, happen so irregularly. To deal with the latter, proxies (such as the proportion of people covered by an evacuation plan) and the audited use of probabilistic catastrophe models (for example to monitor the impact of changing building construction on earthquake losses) are suggested to ensure a consistent measure for a particular country.