Ms Margareta Wahlström:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and the honourable Senators for inviting me here today. Twenty years ago, disasters were perceived to be a problem affecting poor countries. Today, of course, nobody believes this remains a poor-country issue. On the contrary, disasters affect all countries, including the United States, as the Cathaoirleach mentioned. Perhaps the most dramatic of all, just to set us off thinking about the significance of the issue, the Christchurch earthquake took account of 20% of the GDP of New Zealand, a rich, highly developed country. Thus, we are talking about a very significant impact. The OECD countries are the countries with the biggest increases in annual disaster losses to their GDP. Of course the poor countries have the highest and most significant proportional impact on their development, so it really is a unifying issue today.

The Cathaoirleach mentioned my many years working with disasters. When I started working with disasters, there was almost complete focus on saving people's lives. People's lives are increasingly being saved by better early-warning systems and evacuation procedures. There is much greater respect for what can be done to get people out of harm's way. Traditionally, disasters were handled by every country in the world - I do not discriminate between poor and rich in this regard. When something happened, big or small, a country paid for it and moved on, and it pays for it when it happens again. It was an events-driven approach to disasters, as if there were nothing that could be done. Gradually we are trying, through national and international work, to change this deeply ingrained attitude. In many countries I still get wise advice from religious leaders not to interfere in what is only partially created by man but is nature's own way. Having said that, we are trying to be very practical. We started looking at the economics of disasters. How much does a disaster actually cost? It is not just what we pay up-front, but what are the indirect costs? What are the poverty consequences? What long-term consequences does it have on health and education? Every country uses its schools as evacuation sites. Senators should just think about the weeks and months of school time being used up by using schools as evacuation centres. So there are very many practical issues to do with the disaster event itself.

We need to look at the bigger picture. Disasters are events that destroy society's capability to maintain its economic and social development. They represent a development issue and challenge which is closely linked to climate change, with the increasing impact of warming. Seven or eight years ago I had a meeting with climate scientists and meteorologists, who explained the long-range projections. We tried to conceptualise it and establish what it means for us. People who work today with disasters and social and economic planning predict more of the same extreme events, and more unexpected and totally unimaginable events. I believe that is what we have today. There is more flooding and more high winds - many more extreme events.

I do not know how many Senators have heard of the cloudburst in Copenhagen three years ago. My colleagues in the Copenhagen city council tell me that the Danish political leaders did not believe in climate change. Then, in the summer of 2011, there was an enormous cloudburst and Copenhagen was under meters of floodwater for approximately a day. Because Copenhagen is a very old city and does not have modern plumbing, the sewerage and freshwater systems were not segregated. I do not need to remind Senators what the consequences were. To this day no one knows how to pay for it. It has created all kinds of debates over local government municipality partitions of infrastructure. No country has the preparedness to pay for such events. Extreme things about which we did not know happened, and now the Danes believe in climate change.

The other aspect of warming is the unpredictability of weather, with longer droughts and unpredictable sowing periods. This is the case everywhere in the world, including in Europe. Long warm periods are causing forest fires and wildfires.

The health impacts of the new weather conditions are very well documented. One has only to look at easily accessible material on the return of malaria in Europe. Our planning and looking forward must be much more informed by all these areas. The extremities - the disastrous events - have not been fully factored in because we do not count them. Most countries, including in Europe, do not have records of disasters and their costs. Local governments normally have, but if nobody in the central government asks for them they do not go into the national statistics, even today, when we have statistics on everything.

One of the major issues arising in our work for a new disaster risk management framework post-2015 is how to govern disaster risk reduction. How does one plan to reduce risk and exposure? Vulnerability is one aspect, while exposure is the other closely linked aspect. Vulnerability is really about people's soft spots, and those of society, where the risk associated with an extreme event is multiplied several times. It it is about health, education and damage to cultural heritage. Exposure, in its most critical form, is associated with more than just infrastructure. Some countries have very old infrastructure and do not keep up with wear and tear. What about IT infrastructure? One has only to think about New York. I do not know if any Senators were there during Hurricane Sandy. In Manhattan it looked good, but just across the river in New Jersey they had no telephone contacts, no electricity and no idea of what was going on. How can we make these infrastructures much more resilient? Think about big cities that are better prepared, such as Tokyo, which is planning for an earthquake.

The reality check for us all in recent years was represented by incidents such as the flooding in Thailand and Australia, when all the supply chains in the highly integrated international economies started to break down. The break in supply chains due to the Thai floods had an 3% impacton GDP, which was a wake-up call for many mega-companies. I believe Toyota said that the lesson it learned from this, which made it a better company today, is that it did not know who its suppliers were. It might have had hundreds or thousands of suppliers but it could not find them because it had not thought of them as critical links and did not even have their telephone numbers. It now knows the telephone numbers, and it has fewer suppliers and believes it is more resilient. These are some of the critical areas for poor countries. Most of the countries we used to think of as really poor are now rapidly growing economies. They are joining the lower middle income countries and their outlooks are changing radically.

Before I explain who we are, the reason we pay so much attention to the issue of risk is that, from east Asia, which used to be the fastest growing part of the world economically, there are good data showing that the risk accumulation curve and the economic growth curve have exactly the same trajectory. What this means is that countries with fast-growing economies are cutting many corners on long-use planning, quality of infrastructure and urban planning. Officials from China and Vietnam, for example, say that they cut too many corners in the past and now they are paying for that. If the Chinese are not going to accept all the losses they incur - they are protesting - the government needs to look after the future social and economic resilience of the country, and that requires looking back to see what it can do to catch up. That is a major issue. I do not know to what degree Ireland is ready to compare itself to China - the scale is a bit different - but China has done something unique. It is the first country in the world to do this. In its new five-year development plan it has put a ceiling on what it considers to be an acceptable economic impact on GDP, which is 1.5%. This is a public policy now. Its strategy for managing risk is actually mitigation, to ensure it does not supersede that figure. That means engaging in flood management, improving infrastructure such as schools and hospitals, and all the practical things one does to ensure a resilient country. I do not know how many countries are likely to follow that policy, but it is a manifestation of how politically important it is for China, as a country, to maintain the credibility of economic growth and social development.

What is UNISDR? It is a relatively young office in the United Nations which was created in 2000 but was the continuation of 20 years of previous work within the UN, mainly by scientists and technologists. They knew that disasters would overwhelm societies one day but nobody listened to them, so they decided to set up an advocacy and outreach office, which is UNISDR. In 2004 the Indian ocean tsunami occurred. At the same time - this was coincidence, of course - UNISDR had been working with countries and organisations on what we call the Hyogo Framework for Action, which was agreed in Kobe in Japan in January 2005. Kobe is a tragic example of the impact of disasters. When the Kobe earthquake occurred in the mid-1990s, Kobe was the sixth largest commercial port in the world. Enormous damage was caused. The Japanese Government invested hundreds of millions of dollars to get Kobe back in business, but today nobody sees Kobe as a major commercial port any more. Thus, the losses we do not account for are the ones that happen over years or decades.

Kobe's name is in history not because of that but because of the Hyogo Framework for Action, which is a voluntary framework for building the resilience of communities and nations. In five priority areas, it has concrete proposals on what to do to build resilience. We have used that framework as a structure for working with countries and organisations in the past eight years. That is what we are introducing, including in Europe. Europe was probably the last continent to recognise that disaster is a very costly enterprise - unnecessarily so. Five or six years ago development started here, and now Europe is the geographical area that is most quickly taking measures to organise itself nationally and with the help of the European Union. Much in European co-operation is focused on resilience, disaster risk reduction, strengthening civil protection mechanisms and working together in an integrated fashion. It has also been a major help for the United Nations, in our work with the rest of the world, to see how strongly Europe is coming together on this issue.

We work a good deal with regional and national technical institutions and we work closely with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the development agenda. We are trying to focus on the fact that none of these segments is a stand-alone segment; they are totally interdependent. One cannot manage the development agenda unless one recognises the risk and the losses. Some of those losses are strongly linked to climate change and weather variability. In the global policy agenda, this is what we are trying to get through. We are also stimulating the building of national structures for responding to disasters and getting it right.

We are now in the process of designing the post-2015 disaster risk management framework. Our first framework was for the period 2005 to 2015. We fall into this pond of the post-2015 development agenda, the hope for a new climate agreement and also this framework. It could be questioned how this will all work out. The Hyogo framework action 2, as we call it, is actually a free space in a way in which everything comes together. Neither is it a negotiated space. Our partnership with countries is a very interesting one because in this space are contained local governments as well as the strong and extremely vocal participation of parliamentarians from around the world; community representatives, women and also people living with disability; community organisations, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent and our colleagues in the UN system. We are all in the same space. We have just concluded our fourth global meeting last week. The agenda is set for 2015 which includes measures to govern disaster risk reduction, how to put local communities more at the centre, and to help governments to become comfortable with an all-of-society approach. I know Ireland has just agreed on an all-of-society approach for international co-operation. That is the trend that we have to follow through. We need to achieve a much more comfortable policy and programmatic integration of climate change and disaster risk agenda in order not to delay implementation. We need to achieve a much clearer focus on what is called the natural hazards and technological disasters coming together.

It is about the big challenges we face such as what happened at Fukushima and also the challenges associated with any major chemical factory infrastructure. I refer to very practical things like infrastructure, the very rapid global urbanisation and whether countries and communities can get ahead of this very rapid risk accumulation for the future through using already well-known practical instruments.

Every country in the world has a building code but too few countries believe that their building codes are respected, enforced and utilised. Every country and city in the world has land-use planning regulations but it is a question of whether these are taken seriously. We are not respecting some basic rules of nature. A colleague of mine who is a water expert said that water never disappears, it just takes a new path. These new paths are what creates urban flooding and more flash floods. All in all, we must realise that increasingly, disasters are not created by natural forces but rather as a result of how we organise society. We create them but we have the knowledge to reduce and minimise these risks.

Research is one of our instruments for sharing knowledge. Every two years we issue a global assessment report of disaster risk. I will leave a few copies here for Members to use as reference. Our first report was on poverty and disasters. Today it is very clear how poverty and disasters are closely interlinked with one driving the other. The second report was on public investment and disasters, how governments use their financial instruments and what they know about the future risk. It is a very practical guide. This year's report was launched ten days ago and it deals with the private sector and disaster risk. I have tried to reduce this to a very simple perspective since the private sector in most countries in the world is responsible for about 80% of all investment. Unless we can get private sector closely engaged by means of its self-interest and resilience in its investment and contributing to an environment which is much better for their investment income and viability, then we are not likely to succeed. We are working on mobilising private business both globally and, in terms of small and medium enterprises, locally. The SMEs are the ones who have no margin and they go under after a disaster in very large numbers. They are very important for communities.

These are some of the big items on the table. Ireland is a very close partner with us in the European collaboration and it is also internationally strongly engaged in the work on the post-2015 risk management agenda. We then legitimise and try to create politically binding engagement is all this work. The Secretary General reports to the General Assembly every year on the work of the international strategy. The General Assembly then gives guidance through its resolutions and commitments and that is what we are trying to use to mobilise governments even more now. We are making some progress but I must confess that I think it needs to become a lot more real for many more countries. The poorer countries are very aware. The very dry countries see an acceleration in droughts. In our part of the world we are still a little bit hesitant to see this as something that we ought to integrate very strongly in our policy and practice agendas as one of the things that would secure sustainability of our lifestyle models while having to make a few compromises on the way.

I have described some of the most important issues. I have taken a look at Ireland in preparation for my coming here. I have an Irish colleague in my office who keeps talking about the floods in Cork. We can see the infrastructural challenges that many countries share with Ireland. I look forward to hearing comments from Senators on how we can inspire the work of the House. I thank Mr. Gay Mitchell MEP, who is a member of our parliamentarian advisory group. This is a group of very determined and strong advocates who influence thinking on these issues. I am doing everything I can to support them.