Disasters are increasingly expensive and their impacts are severely under-estimated says The Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2025. This new report highlights how direct disaster costs have grown to approximately $202 billion annually, but that the true costs of disasters is over $2.3 trillion when cascading and ecosystem costs are taken into account.
Published by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), the report, sub titled Resilience Pays: Financing and Investing for our Future, outlines how aligning investments with risk realities can break spirals of debt, uninsurability, and increasing humanitarian needs.
“This year’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction examines the risks posed by disasters from now to 2050 and presents an indisputable case for action. It shows the eye-watering losses inflicted by disasters today, which hit vulnerable people the hardest. And it demonstrates that, on our current trajectory, costs will continue to mount as the climate crisis worsens. But it also illustrates that, by boosting and sustaining investment in disaster risk reduction and prevention, we can slow that trend and reap economic benefits – saving lives and livelihoods while driving growth and prosperity, to help reach our Sustainable Development Goals,” wrote António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, in his foreword welcoming the report.
The report outlines how the effects of increasing disaster costs are already being felt around the globe, from the emergence of areas deemed too risky for insurance companies to cover, to growing national debts, and recurring humanitarian crises. However, it also presents case studies and policy recommendations for how investments in resilience can help stop the growing economic cost of disasters, reduce humanitarian needs, and make scarce international assistance resources even more effective.
The Global Assessment Report also shows how the private sector can play a key role in reducing the economic damage of disasters and in filling the protection gap that leaves many countries in a worsening spiral of repeated disasters.
