UNDRR press conference Human Cost of Disasters Report 12 October 2020

Good morning, everybody.

Dennis McLean is my name.

I work for communications at the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Tomorrow, as you all know, is International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction.

And today's press conference is about the report that we're launching to mark that occasion that's very much focused on disaster trends over the last 20 years and raising the issue of disaster risk governance, which is the key concern for the implementation of the Sendai Framework.

2020, in fact, is the deadline for all UN Member States to have in place national and local strategies for Disaster Risk Reduction.

So we're hoping that the publicity and profile around the activities taking place today and tomorrow will motivate more UN Member states to get involved and to develop those strategies.

So without any further ado, I'd like to introduce our first speaker.

It's the Mami Mitsotori, the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction.

And Miss Mitsotori also heads the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction based here in Geneva.

Over to you, Mami.

Thank you, Dennis.

Good morning, everybody from a sunny Geneva.

As Dennis mentioned, we're launching the report The Humanitarian, The Human Cost of Disasters, 2 Thousand 2019, marking the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, which is actually tomorrow.

So thank you very much for joining us.

The focus of this year's International Day is not that glamorous, but one which needs a lot of attention and in particular as we fight COVID-19.

The theme is disaster risk governance.

We can measure good disastrous governance in how many lives are saved, how less people affected, less ill health, injury, loss of livelihood, as well as how much have the critical infrastructure survived, basic service not being disrupted and importantly the amount of economic losses.

So to give you a good example of good risk governance, 50 years ago Bangladesh lost some 1,000,000 people in the Great Cycling of 1970 November.

But thanks to the government's cycling preparedness programme, it was an improved weather forecast, early warning and early action.

The number of lives in similar events lost has come down dramatically since then, and looking at in this report the mass casualty disaster events of the past 20 years, I can certainly say that the death tolls in many cases could have been significantly reduced if we had focused much more on disaster risk governance.

Now, this means having in place early warning systems like in the case of Bangladesh, strong building codes, preserving protective ecosystems, and many more things.

These are essentially measures for prevention and from managing disaster risk.

[Other language spoken]

Time and again, we focus on trying to manage disasters, picking up the pieces after disasters strike and break us, instead of managing disaster risk before they break us.

And we need to really stop this cycle of disaster, respond, recovery, repeat.

And this cycle can only be broken if we do a better job in risk governance, if we do a better job in mitigating existing risks and in the 1st place, not to create new, new risks.

Disaster risk governance requires vision.

It requires a national strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction and requires competent institutions which acts on scientific evidence.

And importantly, these institutions should be empowered with adequate resources.

COVID-19 told us that some countries had very good plans for prevention, but they did not invest in it.

Good disastrous governance depends on political leadership above all, and delivery on the promises made five years ago when the Paris Agreement and the Sendai framework for disastrous reduction were adopted.

But the sad fact is that we are wilfully destructive, and that is the conclusion of this report.

COVID-19 is but the latest proof that political and business leaders are yet to tune into the world around them.

And right now, disaster management agencies, civil protection departments, Fire Brigades, public health authorities, Red Cross and Red Crescent, and many, many NGOs are fighting an uphill battle against an ever rising tide of extreme weather events.

The good news is that more lives have been saved, but the bad news is that more people are being affected by the expanding climate emergency now.

Furthermore, disaster risk is becoming systemic.

This is what COVID-19 showed us.

A public health crisis quickly morphed into a social economic global crisis.

Professor Debarati Gua Sapir will talk about this important report in more detail.

And the fact that extreme weather events has increased so dramatically in the last 20 years should be a reminder to UN member States of their commitment to strengthen disaster risk governance by having the local and national strategies for Disaster Risk Reduction by the end of this year.

This is one of the seven global targets of the Sendai Framework and it is the foundation for good risk governance.

So far, 93 countries have their national strategies in place.

Is this a glass half empty or half full?

I should say half empty because there should be more at this moment.

Remember, end of this year is the deadline and also an ongoing review of these 93 strategies show that more needs to be done to improve their quality.

For example, coherence amongst Disaster Risk Reduction strategies, climate action and achieving vestiges.

In the case of COVID-19, every UN Member State needs to have its own pandemic repairness programme.

This is also very important and we have seen that very few actually do in biological hazards should be fully included in their strategies.

The pandemic is widening the resilience gap around the world, creating more poverty and inequality, and this makes it even more urgent that low and middle income countries, which are already facing a rise in extreme weather events, receive enhanced international cooperation to strengthen their capacity to manage risk and prevent natural hazards from becoming disasters.

This is another of the global targets, increased international cooperation, but it is far from being implemented.

So I'll stop here.

And I thank you for your attention.

And I would like to now give the floor to my distinguished fellow speaker, Professor Debarati Gua Sapia, to talk about this important report.

Over to you Debbie.

Thank you, Thank you Nami, Thank you UNDRR for having organised this.

We do this actually every year for several years now.

And it is always a pleasure for me to not only be with the UNDRR colleagues with whom I have a long history, but also the press conference which actually brings to the fore some of the main issues that we have to focus on.

Now, Amy did mention quite clearly some of the bigger macro global issues.

Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus in a little more on the report itself and see what the data, the data coming from M Dat actually shows and to point out to highlight some of the issues that we would like to have the world community and maybe the national communities focusing 0 in a little more than they have done before.

So I will start my screen sharing now.

There's quite a lot of material in my my presentation.

I'm not going to go through everything.

I'm just going to highlight some of the points.

And you can have access to all the other material if you want to write, which I'm hoping you will do if you want to write a more substantive piece on this issue.

So share screen and.

How's that?

That's fine, Debbie.

[Other language spoken]

So the report has been made available to you in principle.

So you will get much more detail on it.

So let me just go over some of the highlights.

So the overview of all natural disasters natural, I mean, I mean, I would like to kind of specify that the impact of the disasters have very little natural in them.

I think UNFDRR has done a very good job in trying to promote the idea that the impact of natural disaster is man made, but the hazard itself is natural.

So we tend to use the word natural disasters, but you know, I think that's an it's an it is a misnomer.

But anyway, so here you have the share of the weather related, the climate related disasters on the overall disaster occurrences.

So if you take the total 100% of all disasters that have qualified for MDOT inclusion.

So what we we actually capture and we register you over here, you will see, let me see, I'll use the cursor.

So over here you see that these three bars colours everything, in fact everything except these red guys at the bottom.

These three colours represent all climate related disasters.

And I think it's quite obvious that it explains a huge share, a huge share of all the catastrophic disasters that have happened in the decade that we are.

We are looking at the numbers of people affected is also similarly related mostly through to climate related events.

I mean that is the truth and I think we have to face that.

We have to face the fact that the bulk of our impact is in fact from climate related stuff.

The most of the affected people are coming from as as one group from floods.

This is in fact, as you know, many of you may be in, in Europe right now, but maybe you're not.

But floods have been in the South Asia, even in, in, in, in in Africa where it's relatively less 41 percent, 1.6 billion people are affected who are affected by floods.

This is a huge number of people.

This is a huge number of people that is The Who are actually sliding back in their development progress 1.4 billion due to drought.

This is this is an important, very important event because drought has not only impact on the people and the likelihood, it also has an impact on food production and that is a critical aspect.

And then there is there are storms and, and earthquakes and so on and so forth.

The the main points are summarised here, which you can consult before before going into this slide.

I would like to mention something but Dennis mentioned that we have no mammy did that we have looked at in this case UNDRRN us.

We have looked at how much increase or decrease has occurred between say 1980, twenty years in 1980 to suppose if it's 20 years it's 1999 and now.

So in other words, looking at a slightly longer term trend because none of these natural disasters or disasters do not change very fast.

That's the truth because these are processes that take time and so you have to look at it over a longer period of time.

Although I'm not showing the graph here, but you will find it in the in the report.

Floods have increased 134%, wildfires, landslides have all increased by 1/2.

Storms have increased by 40%.

But extreme temperatures as you see in this extreme temperatures have increased by 232.

Sorry, there you go, 232% in extreme temperatures.

Most of the extreme temperatures, and I would like to underline this because it's going to be our biggest challenge and it is relatively neglected right now because it's kind of an amorphous thing.

Most of the extreme temperature events and most of the deaths are due to heat waves.

Heat waves are going to be our biggest challenge in the next 10 years.

Biggest challenge especially in the poor countries.

Europe accounted for many of the heat wave deaths over here, but that is because people die in hospitals.

People in Europe die in hospitals and they have death certificates and underlying cause of death which is very well recorded.

Most of the people who die from extreme heat in poor countries don't die in hospitals, they die at home and they die for causes that are not linked to extreme heat exposure.

[Other language spoken]

So extreme temperatures have increased dramatically in the previous decades and has very, very little international attention or even national attention.

Droughts have a large impact worldwide and a disproportionate impact in the poorer regions of the world, mostly because poorer regions of the world have small parcels of land.

And so if they lose that harvest, they lose their subsistence farmers and they lose their ability to eat.

The IPCC projections which have done much more complicated, much more data reach etcetera, analysis actually confirm this.

[Other language spoken]

So our data which has a lot of limitations show exactly what the IPCC has actually said.

And the slight advantage with what we are saying is that it is more accessible to the larger population who are at the end of the day are beneficiaries and who have to be taken along with any policy decision.

It's not happening right on top.

It is actually happening on the ground.

[Other language spoken]

The interesting part of geophysical disasters is that any earthquakes, volcanoes or dry lands, landslides, which are all geophysical, have a very **** mortality rate.

They have the highest mortality rate of all natural disasters.

So in other words, when you have an earthquake, a very large number of people tend to die if they happen to be in the exposed area and the rest of them kind of walk away.

So nearly 60% of all deaths were due to earthquakes.

Earthquakes are killers and unfortunately earthquakes require infrastructural responses and therefore very often expensive responses.

[Other language spoken]

You have the 10 deadliest disasters in, in this little icon and you will see that earthquakes do feature almost among the 10, five of them, six of them are actually earthquakes.

So I just summarised the, the, the, the problems with earthquakes and what kind of approaches we have to take governments at the end of the day.

And you know, it seems like an easy way out, which at the end of the day, earthquakes or any kind of geophysical disasters really need government based solutions.

They really need the national responsible authority to take this in hand.

This becomes much less of a community level action like many of the other disasters are.

Earthquakes need building regulations, land zoning, etcetera, which are actually government responsibilities.

So now 2 quick slides on how disasters disproportionately impact smaller and lower income.

This is a kind of an slightly more you're trying to kind of, you know, index the data to make sure that large countries don't feature **** or small countries.

You want to index the data a little bit to give it some kind of comparability.

And here what you, what you see, what we, we see here is that the little the, those, those columns here with the, with the lines, if you like, the big blocks are absolute numbers, right?

[Other language spoken]

And these the, the little, the other ones are average number of deaths per disaster.

So in other words, we are trying to see whether you have disasters which are by by income, which are more deadly for a country than other disasters.

What is the average number?

So sometimes you can have just three disasters, but each all three of them **** a lot of people.

Or you can have 89 disasters but they **** all most nobody.

So this is this is a comparison.

And what we see is that per disaster, per disaster, if you if you standardise it per disaster, you see that the poorest people seem to die much more per disaster than do the **** income people.

[Other language spoken]

So controlling for the number of disasters, and this is, sorry, can I do this?

[Other language spoken]

And it's summarised in the little text next to the graphic.

Next, we look at very quickly the income losses and the income losses we see.

In fact, the most important aspect I think, which is important to point out here is that while absolute losses in terms of absolute amounts of money is way, way, I mean, I can't even can't even estimate how much higher this grey green block is compared to this one, but it's way higher.

[Other language spoken]

It says 1 .992 trillion, 2 trillion in the **** income countries and it's a miserable poultry, 38 billion in poor countries.

But the if you if we look at it standardised by the GDPS, you have nearly 0.6 on average for the whole twenty, 0.61% that are that is affected in the poor countries, 0.61% of the GDP and only zero point.

One, 8% of the wealthier countries.

So it's important not to report on only economic losses in absolute terms, because that is close to meaningless.

So I will end by this last few conclusions which we find.

Sorry, that's a bit.

[Other language spoken]

So which we have found in the report and in our analysis to be probably the flashpoints of the coming year or for disaster planning in the future.

First of all, 65% of all disaster events did not report any estimates for economic losses.

This is huge and this completely screws up the way you analyse disasters.

If 65% if 2/3 of them don't report anything, then you're actually leaving out more than half of the disasters.

Nearly 90% of all disaster events in Africa and 80% of events in South Asia had no data.

About 70% and of droughts and 90% of extreme temperature events reported no figures.

I'll come back to it just before ending and you will see the other points that I've raised over here.

Now I just want to come back to the extreme temperatures and droughts.

These are two problems that are going to be our biggest problems in the next decade and they are the two disaster events that have the worst record in data.

Now what cannot be counted does not count.

This is this is this is the message I want to leave you with.

What cannot be counted does not count.

That is the reality.

We can go on and say, oh, lots of people are being, you know, affected by the droughts and lots of people are suffering from the heat.

Lots of people is not good enough.

Nobody will change policy on lots of people.

So I would like to leave you with the idea that the quality of data, especially for extreme temperatures and droughts, which are our biggest challenges coming up, is probably one of the biggest priorities that we have to face and deal with in the next decade.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much, Debbie, for those very insightful observations on disaster trends over the last 40 years indeed, and the staggering rise we've seen over the last 20 years in the number of extreme weather events.

We're we're now open to questions from the floor.

And I should, by the way, say that by this afternoon, anybody who would actually like to have a hard copy of the report will be available in the press room at the parley.

You've already, all of you should have already received a link to the actual online version of the report as well as the press release that we are issuing under embargo.

I received a couple of questions already by e-mail.

One, one question is what impact I suppose this is for both of you, what impact is COVID-19 having on efforts to respond to extreme weather events?

Mammy, would you like to take that question first?

[Other language spoken]

So what impact is COVID-19 having on?

The response to extreme weather events.

Right.

So we have seen a couple of countries which have been hit by extreme weather events during COVID-19.

And so far I would say that the the national disaster risk management agencies are doing, I did quite well in getting people evacuated, making sure that as much as possible social distancing could be maintained.

[Other language spoken]

However, there's a big issue right, that most countries have very limited number of people and resources for the both the response and prevention for disasters.

And in many countries the same organisation is is in charge of this.

So I do have a concern that the ongoing COVID-19 will can, if not deter, slow down the pace of national governments in trying to put in more preventive measures into extreme weather events.

But on a rather, let's say, a positive note, I think that COVID-19 has really, really raised the awareness not only amongst the governments but also the public in general about the risks that surround us and about the systemic nature of the risk which this report also talks about.

South, one risk leads to another.

And they can see that if COVID-19 is as terrible as it is right now, climate emergency can be even worse.

This can be a warm up event.

So I'm hoping, and I see it in what the people are saying and what the media is reporting, that there is much more awareness and awareness that prevention saves lives.

This is, I think the the good message.

But we need to see again, talking about it the the interlinkage, the recovery from COVID-19.

What is this going to be?

It has to be resilient, it has to be equitable.

Importantly, it has to be green.

If we can't have a green recovery from COVID-19, then we are just adding to the climate emergency.

So I think now, while still some countries are responding, we already have to make sure that the recovery is green and that is the test for us.

Over to you.

[Other language spoken]

Debbie, do you have anything to add to that?

[Other language spoken]

And let me just, let me just quickly say that in fact, the COVID efforts to respond, I think it's an it's an extremely critical issue for almost everything else, everything else that's acute.

For example, we've been doing some work on measles vaccination campaigns and this has a lesson for disaster response, measles vaccination campaigns.

Now many of the measles vaccination campaigns in the most susceptible countries, most vulnerable countries were in fact stopped or postponed.

This is a, this is a extremely bad and short sighted policy.

We've published in Science, we've published in the British Medical Journal on this.

It is an extremely short sighted policy.

And this goes also for disasters.

If we, if we somehow use this social distancing and you know, all of these other measures which are absolutely essential and we do not provide the necessary equipment, the necessary, you know, the support for people who go out for response to disasters or people who do essential prevention.

We are going to have to face another problem in about 6 months time.

And that's not going to be COVID, but it's related to the measures of COVID.

So I think it has a very important aspect in the greater scheme of things.

[Other language spoken]

I see a hand raised from DPA Christine Ulrich I think.

[Other language spoken]

I have a question mainly about the the counting here of events.

I'm not sure how you can compare the these 220 year periods because I guess that in 20 in 1980 a disaster, the bar is rather low.

A disaster with 10 people dead from some remote part of Myanmar might not have reported been reported, whereas now it would be reported.

Have you made adjustments for these changes?

That would be my first question and I've done the math here.

I hope I'm not wrong, but I think in the previous 20 year periods, climates weather events were 86% of the total and now they in the last 20 years were 90%.

So it's not that much of a difference.

And my last question is, do you count something like the Indian Ocean tsunami with 230 dead equally as one one event as a drought that might **** 10 people in Bangladesh?

Is that the the weight issue here?

[Other language spoken]

Thank you, Toby.

I think that's a question for you.

Yeah, it's scribbling away madly for the.

I got the last two, the first one.

You make adjustments for changes.

[Other language spoken]

Yes, yes, that's right.

That's right.

That's right from 1982.

Yeah, this is a.

So let me just go in the order of what you just said, Christina, I think right, Christina.

So let me just go into order of what you said.

Now we believe together with our colleagues in Munich Reinsurance and Swiss Reinsurance, we believe that from about 1980, the reporting bias, which is essentially what you're talking about, the reporting bias that is communications, electronic communications, so on and so forth, has what has improved sufficiently to be fairly confident.

We don't know what the bias is, that's the truth.

But to be fairly confident that in 1980, from 1980 onwards, a little before we are actually capturing almost all of the disasters that would qualify for MDAT.

And remember for MDAT, our disasters have to reach a certain threshold.

So these are not flash in the pan kind of, you know, little thing that's happened somewhere.

No, it has to arrive at a certain threshold and that gets picked up and we feel that and all of us actually the, the, the, the, the, the other databases as well if you ask them.

We feel that by that time we are really, we are really losing very few.

We are really losing very few.

And in about 10 years time, I think, frankly, I think in MDAT we are not losing any.

There's very little disasters, events that people can tell us.

We have communication all the time.

People can tell us, oh, but we had this huge flood and in which 57 people died and you don't have it.

That doesn't happen.

The second thing is 86 the change, there's not much change.

You're absolutely right, there is not much change.

Then that's that's the problem we have in these press conferences.

We have been repeatedly saying not last year, not in the last 10 years, we have been repeatedly saying that the problem with climate related disasters is growing and is actually taking the mass of all the disasters.

We've been saying that, well, that's, that's the truth.

It has been that way and it will continue to be that way if we don't do anything about the environment, ecology and the climate.

The third question was 16 countries.

Tsunami and drought we assign for a multi country disaster.

[Other language spoken]

Very often we assign values by country.

So our database is a country based.

We don't have A1 phenomena that involves 3 countries, 13 countries, 36 countries.

We don't have that.

[Other language spoken]

If you're really interested, we can in our database, it can collapse if you have droughts in, you know, five African countries.

It's listed by 5 countries, but you can also collapse it by the event.

So that option is there for you.

[Other language spoken]

I would just add if I might to that response that while the percentage may have only grown by, I don't think your calculation is 86% to 91%.

The actual volume of events has has risen enormously from reported disasters in of 4212 between 1980 and 1999 have risen to 7348 over the last 20 years.

So there is quite a significant growth in the volume of these events whatever about the the division between earthquakes and climate related events.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you for taking my question.

I just had a quick question on in light of the COVID crisis, I'm wondering if there's a consideration of adding an additional sector to your, your report going forward for these biohazards or disease related disasters.

And also if you could say something about, I mean climate change in relation to such disease related disasters.

I assume that climate is having a big impact on that.

If you've had any time to look at, at that at all, it would be great if you could say a bit more about that.

[Other language spoken]

Yeah, I, I think you know Nina, we have we have discussed with UNDRR you know at length about whether or not to include biological, biological includes low cuts and things like that.

It's not just diseases to include epidemics or not.

And maybe we will think of in the next months or next year to do something on epidemics.

I think it might be timely.

It might be important.

We have to the problem is the data needs to be cleaned a lot.

It's a very labour intensive stuff now.

So, so you're, you're right, you're right there.

I think it is an important part important issue.

And to that brings me to your next question on disasters and disease.

This has been pushed to the back burner forever.

I mean, you know, I've been in this business for many, many years.

It's been pushed to the back burners.

Yeah, well, it's related, but, you know, we have other things to do, you know, and the urgent becomes more, you know, goes higher in the priority than the importance.

So nobody paid any attention to the fact that natural disasters have a tremendous impact on both the variability of climate, this is, and this relates to extreme temperatures, but it also has a huge impact on the ecological change which brings about all these epidemics of different kinds.

For many reasons, I don't want to go into it now, but ecological change and environmental change brought about by massive national disasters, droughts and so on and so forth has a very big impact.

I just wanted to say something, the only sorry, you wanted to know whether there are studies, the only really convincing, scientifically sound studies that have been done relating the environment.

No, I don't want to say only don't quote me on that.

Some of the studies that have been really on malaria.

Malaria has had one of the best literature bodies of literature looking at our environment and global warming changes the the risk of malaria epidemics, but the rest of it really needs to be done.

[Other language spoken]

Mammy, is there anything you would like to add?

We know that biological hazards were specifically included in the terms of reference of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Thank you, Dennis.

So exactly as you mentioned, Dennis, many of you may know or may not know that in 2015, when the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Production was adopted, it was a big push by countries which experienced Ebola, MERS and SARS to put biological hazards, add it to the list of hazards that would be a part of the Sendai framework.

Before Sendai Framework, there was another global framework, the Kyogo for Action and that one only dealt with what we call natural hazards.

Now Sendai really expanded its fear of hazards, including chemical, biological, technological, environmental hazards and risks.

And so COVID-19 is a part and parcel of the Sendai framework.

When the COVID-19 breakout started, we quickly started working with Member States to see whether they actually had biological hazards in their national strategies for Disaster Risk Reduction.

And as I mentioned in my opening remarks, unfortunately not many had biological hazards in it.

So now we are working on supporting countries to include it.

And another quite an interesting thing that came out was that actually many national strategies for Disaster Risk Reduction were not multi hazard.

Now this is very important because as we know now hazards risks are multiple and they attack us at the same time.

So it's not good enough to base your strategy on what has historically been the biggest hazard that turned into disaster in your country and you need to be prepared for multi hazards attacking you at the same time.

So that is something that we are also working with the Member States and I'll just mention that we have compiled our early findings from COVID-19 and the early lessons learned.

We will be publishing it very soon, probably sometime next week, if not this week.

So we hope that we can share it with you.

But absolutely, like Debbie said, this annual reports are very much based on robust data.

We do hope that we can do something could Debbie create on this, but we do need a data, but absolutely it's a very important area.

Over to you, Dennis.

[Other language spoken]

We I see another hand raised from Peter.

[Other language spoken]

Peter, the floor is yours.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you for taking my question, Miss Glory.

You mentioned that perhaps one of the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is that there is a.

Perhaps a greater awareness of being prepared for disasters.

I'm just wondering if you think that your optimism there in that area exceeds the the sort of disaster allocation of resources that's going to have to come to the global economy from a hugely shrinking economy from this year, which is expected to have an impact over a number of years?

[Other language spoken]

That's a very good question goes to the core of what we are talking about.

So we need to be optimistic about this unless we can just you know, drop what we're doing and do something else.

But but the truth is that yes, I can see where you're coming from.

And the problem is that we do forget, don't we?

[Other language spoken]

We are awareness goes up and then we get busy and other things.

And now as you said, now that we need to put in trillions and trillions of dollar into just boosting the economy.

There is a danger that there might be a lot of appetite for quick fixes.

But the point is really with these quick fixes, you do many times create more risk.

And up to now development was a trajectory which created a lot of risk.

And now we know that unless we start preventing, unless we put more money into prevention part, any kind of money that goes into development and as you say more so from a very limited amount of resources will not be sustainable.

Nothing really and do sustainable development like disasters.

I, I see that in Europe for one in the youth that the recovery package is really designed around green, around resilience, around equity.

So I do have hope about this, but I think the problem maybe is that we need to have a more accurate pricing of risk.

We don't have enough data, let's say proof, that actually investing in prevention and making risk informed decision does pay off.

This is something that Mark Carney started while he was still at the Bank of England pricing risk, making sure that climate risk is disclosed.

We do believe that it should be more than climate risk or disaster risk should be priced and once they are priced, all public and private sector have to price this risk into their informed decision.

So I know it's not an easy thing, but I do feel that yes, we do need to be optimistic.

And The thing is if we can't do it, I mean really COVID-19 is going to be a warm up event for what's happening from climate emergency.

We could isolate ourselves from COVID-19 one way or another.

We can't isolate ourselves from these extreme weather events, from the extreme **** temperature that Debbie was talking about, even in developed countries, let alone developing countries.

So I really think that we don't have an another option.

Debbie, would you like to add anything?

No, I think, I think mummy really covered, covered it very succinctly and and I agree with her on every point.

[Other language spoken]

Well, I don't see, I don't see any other hands raised for a question in the Zoom room.

So it just leaves me to say that again that the report is now available online.

Hard copies will be distributed in the Palais this afternoon and we look forward to any coverage that we get from from this event tomorrow for International Day Disaster Risk Reduction.

Our thanks to our colleagues of UNTV for hosting this event and our our thanks again to Professor Deborati who has superior for joining us from the University of Levain in in Belgium.

And our thanks, of course, to Mami Misatori, who's based here in Geneva, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Thank you all for joining us and have a good day.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you, Dennis.

[Other language spoken]

Everyone bye bye, bye bye.

[Other language spoken]