By 2100, around 200 million people in the world will be affected by sea-level rise, 27 million in India alone, a report of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction says. The ‘Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2022 (GAR2022)’ projects that over half of the affected population will be in Asia, with China (43 million) and Bangladesh (32 million) the most affected.
Noting that sea levels rose on average 3.7 mm per year since 2006 against 1.3 mm per year between 1901 and 1971, the report states that the rapid urbanisation and concentration of large cities in coastal areas, subject to the impacts of sea-level rise, is making people more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
According to the report, about 110 million people out of the 250 million living in the Indus basin across Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan are living in extreme poverty, and are vulnerable to climate change impacts. “With low to moderate levels of access to basic services, healthcare and education, large parts of the basin’s population are vulnerable to climate change impacts and have low adaptive capacity, with the population expected to increase,” it notes.
It also showcases an assessment conducted in the old city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in 2020 during the first peak of COVID-19 infections to suggest that systemic risk governance requires local-level understanding and assessment of risk through the lens of systems analysis and in light of underlying structural vulnerabilities.
“In today’s crowded and interconnected world, disaster impacts increasingly cascade across geographies and sectors, as the coronavirus disease pandemic and climate change are rapidly making clear,” it said.
The report says understanding and reducing risk in a world of uncertainty is fundamental to achieving genuinely sustainable development. “The best defence against future shocks is to transform systems now, to build resilience by addressing climate change and to reduce the vulnerability, exposure and inequality that drive disasters,” it says.
To accelerate essential risk reduction and resilience building, GAR2022 calls for an action to measure what we value, and design systems to factor in how human minds make decisions about risks. It also calls for reconfiguring of governance and financial systems to work across silos and design in consultation with affected people.
