Ms Margareta Wahlström:

I thank the Senators for their interesting and significant questions. Indeed, I may have to take up the invitation to come back again another time. I will start with the last question, which is significant not only for risk management but also in terms of understanding how the UN works with countries. I did not mention earlier that my office is staffed by 100 people worldwide. Some people believe that we are punching above our weight, given the number of staff we have. In terms of the way we operate, we are leveraged by the richer countries, which do not need our money but do need co-operative engagement with us. They need to share experiences and expertise with us. Countries exercise a lot more peer pressure on each other than any UN official can even inspire them to think about.

What we see in the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, or the ISDR system, as we call it, is a forum in which countries freely talk about issues that in other political settings would have a different spin. A very senior Indian official said that the reason he liked this forum was that he got a lot of ideas and talked to a lot of people and there was no agenda, which he found unusual. I can this is developing very rapidly. In fact, there are some enthusiastic people who see this as the future for global collaboration among countries. South-south co-operation is developing rapidly because it is no longer a question of the rich north and the poor south. We are in a very different phase globally.

The European Commission and the European Union are not filling the UN space but they do understand how the UN can be useful to the EU. They have engaged strongly in formulating the Hyogo Framework for Action II, known as HFA II, the post-2015 framework, and putting it high on their agenda. They are very active in this. This follows on from the rather painful period some years ago when the European entities did not work together. We had a very tense situation between the civil protection entities and the so-called humanitarian work. I happened to be working in a different post at that time but I can assure this House that there has been a complete transformation since then. The Europeans now work together in crisis response. There is one crisis response. The Monitoring and Information Centre, MIC, has become a very effective instrument and there is a joined-up approach with the rest of the world, including the UN agencies, to disaster response.

In the European Commission, for internal reasons or because it was originally a very strongly humanitarian issue, the Director-General for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection has the lead role in driving the European Commission post-2015 agenda, and she is doing that in an inclusive way. When she came to our global platform meeting last week, she had consulted seven different DGs in order to represent the Commission's perspective on resilience and disaster risk. I must commend the Commission because, in many ways, it is a little ahead of the UN in this strong internal mainstreaming work. The UN has also been doing this but we have not globalised it as strongly as the Commission. It has covered the environment, health, climate, finance and humanitarian and development agenda. The Irish Presidency has been strongly driving the resilience approach and that is becoming a well-packaged external framework for all of this thinking. I am pleased as a participant, a beneficiary and an observer, and I am quite impressed by how Europe is coming together on this.

I was asked whether the UN had identified areas that are particularly challenged in terms of access as part of a risk management approach. It has from the perspective of peace and security, political affairs and humanitarian assistance and it is very much linked to how the UN operates in different countries. Access is not always related to political issues but to a genuine conflict issue and getting in the way of open conflict. The UN has tried to develop a much more practical approach to its own security management, but that is only part of the parcel. The largest security management element is the people we are trying to assist and how they are affected by the presence of international organisations. It is not always positive. In countries of which I have much more experience, such as Afghanistan, it has a negative image today but I have just been there to try to engage more strongly in disaster risk reduction and building national institutions. When one is there, one can see that some of the security and safety issues are related to the international presence but they are not all identical necessarily to the national risks. The complexities lead not to global statements about access but more localised understanding of access and they are very much related to specific operations.

There is a great deal of locally fuelled conflict in South Sudan. I am not an expert on the country but I follow it closely because we all want South Sudan to succeed. I was pleased to see the country participate in our global meeting last week, which means its officials also have their eye on the future. This is a positive message.

Senator O'Keeffe had a question about schools and education and also mentioned public awareness. I often ask, in discussion with both governments and the business sector, if there was only one thing we could do much more of, what would it be? They all say public awareness and education, which needs to be much more systematic. Ever since we started work, we have said disaster risk should be integrated into school curricula, starting at primary level, in the context of how to protect one's self against accidents and learning basic safety procedures. It should not be dropped there. We have all seen pictures of children hiding under school benches to protect their heads against earthquakes, which works. Japan discovered painfully following the tsunami in 2011 that young people also have to be educated to take their own decisions and to use their judgment, because there were tragic examples of children, doing exactly what they had been told, waiting for an instruction to leave, and none of them survived. Japan is rethinking its education approach and considering how to give people the self-confidence that militarists call "situational awareness". One Senator mentioned the ability to respond to a crisis situation. Situational awareness is needed. One can plan and prepare but no event is similar to the previous one, and therefore one needs to develop one's basic instincts and reactions.

Secondary and higher education are critical. One of the enormous gaps that exists today is that it is still, surprisingly, unique at university level that the main curricula do not include risk. Not even engineers include it. If they think of risk, it is not the type of risk we see. Risk management is gradually making its way into agriculture, engineering, water management, psychology, education and law programmes. When I raise this and tell my colleagues in academia and university that we have to be much more serious about this, they say it is very difficult. I acknowledge it is difficult but they say there is no jobs market for this. There is, and it is developing rapidly. It is one of the big areas in which we do not have enough expertise. There is high demand for expertise in managing risks in all kinds of technical area. Strong academic networks around the world are trying to promote this but they are not yet there.

The other aspect of education is that if we include education about disasters in our country's geography, history, philosophy and religion curricula, we learn to live with our disasters. We learn from them in an active manner. It is integrated in our thinking and we get to know our country a little better. It is also easier to talk about things that in some places are seen to be rather traumatic events. I still meet many senior officials who say they do not want to talk to their people about disasters because they may panic. My humble answer, I hope, is that they will panic much more if they are not told, because with social media today, people have all kinds of information. If the authorities do not tell them anything, people will start second-guessing. The authorities do not have the right of interpretation any more unless they use it proactively, and this creates, in many instances, a serious confidence gap between people and their national authorities. Governments are more important than ever before because we want to have authority and we need an authoritative, credible voice, but if that is absent, social media are not a good substitute. They are good for many things but not to issue an authoritative opinion on the risk of an earthquake, for example.

I was asked about the role of private business and politicians. I will share my observation, which has been confirmed by many of those involved. Automatically, when one comes to the point of what to do, businesses say they do not need more regulation, while governments tend to see their role as regulators as the primary one. The missing link is the honest conversation between business and the public sector, which can create that common space where each can take their responsibility for resilience - businesses because they need to make money and governments because they need safety.

I have watched many of these interactions. They are polite but never go to the core of the issue. What we see, and what political leaders may also see, is that the work we are doing is really about creating the common space. In the United Nations, all we can do is develop the conversation with each party progressively so that practical action can be taken. Of course, it is a case of some regulations but, very often, areas are over-regulated, thereby creating more risks. There is no obvious blueprint. One must really detect what the core issues are.

When one notes how many companies are involved in the World Economic Forum's work on resilience and the surveys carried out on chief executive officers' main worries every year, one realises these are critical issues on the agenda. In some years, it may be a question of global governance or financial risk and, in others, it may be a question of disaster risk, and climatic risk for sure. There is interest but the challenge concerns how to move out of the preconditioned roles. This is an important area for political leaders in all countries.

A question was asked on how communities rebuild after disasters. Normally, it occurs very painfully. Since there is so much public attention paid to a disaster - even if it is a localised disaster, help very often comes from other parts of society - the most difficult period is the reconstruction period. It is costly and takes time and really wears people down. It diminishes people's patience, exacerbates the economic impact and suffering, creates psychological and family problems, and can result in alcoholism and unemployment. These are all the negative factors. Some say reconstruction also fuels economic growth. This occurs sometimes but the effect is very much temporary, as all the research shows. This is the main area in which countries can still learn a lot from each other.

I was asked about the budget for disaster relief. Over the past three years, some of the richest countries and some of the not-so-rich ones have been saying governments can no longer cope and that all of society must take responsibility. That is because reconstruction costs are so great and because of shrinking governments. Hence, the need for an all-of-society approach. In many countries, it is a question of paying for the disaster event itself. Who pays? Many governments feel they are already paying too much and they are putting a ceiling on the budget, particularly in Europe. Businesses never talk about how much they pay because it is a competition issue. Communities and citizens have no idea what is paid because somehow they do not attach dollar value to their losses. In some countries, insurance companies compensate and, in others, the government will give compensation. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, this does not happen. The next realisation period will be when citizens discover this is a bit too much. The various strands need to be budgeted and planned for separately because there are different types of processes involved.

Local government can handle a lot but cannot succeed alone. Financial resources will be scarce. The insurance industry can do a lot more but it has also taken a beating by virtue of increasing losses. The insurance industry is one that needs to develop a different kind of conversation with the public sector because there is a mutual effort to try to transfer the risk. Governments are trying to transfer it to the private sector while the latter is trying to transfer it to governments. This is not a very productive path forward. We are trying to encourage the insurance industry to deal with this.

Rwanda is a very interesting example. As stated, it has been very much rebuilt by widows, by women. Rwanda, amazingly, is something of a gold-star country in our work, so much so that it is definitely advising other countries on how to build resilience in respect of women's initiatives and how to revitalise community action as a way forward. Much has been done on climatic and economic structural vulnerabilities. The country is densely populated. For sure, all the historical problems have not been settled. If there is a political slippage in Rwanda with a consequent economic impact, there will be a risk that all the traditional conflicts over resources and challenges will recur. Today, we are impressed with the work Rwanda is doing and how its authorities have managed to hold the country together according to strong priorities. I am conscious of the role Rwanda plays in east Africa and elsewhere. We must support Rwanda through keeping an eye on the risk factors that could destabilise the country. It is not at all certain that Rwanda will have the same leadership in the future as it has now. That is an obvious point.

Reference was made to technology. There may be business opportunities associated with ignoring the factors I describe, taking shortcuts and being disruptive, but there are also considerable business opportunities associated with resilience development, as there are in developing energy technology, better housing and land-use planning technologies. That is one area that the United Nations, European Union and many other organisations recognise as growing.

Another factor concerns communities. I refer to self-organising communities in respect of which social media will change the landscape. There is no doubt about it. We hope that the new level of social mobilisation will empower local governments and communities to attract much more respect for the work they already do and to be entrusted to do much more work on resilience building. This would surely stimulate the engagement of the science and technology sectors such that knowledge can be used much more practically to assist at local level.

A question was asked on social justice and business opportunities. Developing the thinking of businesses in terms of their being members of a community concerns justice issues. It is a question of employees' income and good business reputation. Some businesses are working very well in this regard. We hope they will have an influence over others so their example will spread. This message will be strong in the post-2015 era because community groups themselves are now so strongly present. They talk to companies. They talk directly to those that can do better.

I wish to comment on risk assessment. It is a very basic start. Although many countries and local governments invest in risk assessment, too many risk assessment reports sit on a bookshelf and are not transformed into practical action.

My final point is on floating responsibility for managing risk. Sometimes it lies with the civil defence, at other times with the Prime Minister's office, and at other times with the office of the Minister responsible for the environment. The big leap forward that we must achieve between now and 2015 involves moving from having one model of governance to having an understanding that governance associated with managing risk is different from managing the response to disasters.

It needs to sit in a very central place in a government or an organisation and needs to be clearly defined. The practices are set. We have tried to put them together and show why this is a critical part of moving forward the knowledge agenda.