The Global Assessment Report (GAR) 2025: Resilience Pays: Financing and Investing for our Future highlights how smarter investment can reset the destructive cycle of disasters, debt, uninsurability and humanitarian need that threatens a climate-changed world. Disaster risk is increasing as more frequent and intense hazard events, unsafe urbanization and ineffective development put more people and assets in harm’s way. Disasters are having profound macroeconomic impacts, with direct losses estimated at $202 billion. When indirect and ecosystem costs are taken into account, escalating disaster costs now surpass $2.3 trillion annually. There is an urgent need to transform how disaster risk is addressed amid a rapidly changing climate. Risk is no longer a peripheral issue but a systemic challenge that affects financial stability, sustainability, and equity. By embedding risk reduction into core policy and investment decisions, it is possible to break the recurring cycle of shocks, losses and debt. With the right choices, resilience can become a foundation for long-term prosperity, enabling societies not only to withstand disasters but to thrive despite them.

Global warming will surpass 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels during the next decade, due to greenhouse gas emissions. The constant rise in temperatures and related impacts combine with other pressures, thus increasing risk and undermining resilience. The increasing interconnectedness of people and human systems increases the risk of compound and cascading crises. The maps in this report highlight a number of these resilience deficits that are holding back achievement of key sustainable development goals. At the same time, the report’s action case examples show that this is not inevitable, and how action is possible on every continent to stop the worsening spiral of risk and disasters and to accelerate SDG target achievement. Addressing resilience gaps will require the unprecedented scaling-up of resilience investment and adaptation action both from within the public and private sectors, particularly for the most vulnerable countries. As these investments take time to mobilize and prepare, delay will increase the inevitable costs. Action is needed now. Disaster risk reduction sits at the nexus between development, humanitarian and climate change action, and can help foster more-sustainable resilient action in each. Readjusting development pathways requires a re-examination of how prosperity is measured, and a greater emphasis on resilience as key element of sustainable development today and in the future.

Droughts have deep, widespread and underestimated impacts on societies, ecosystems, and economies. They incur costs that are borne disproportionately by the most vulnerable people. The extensive impacts of drought are consistently underreported even though they span large areas, cascade through systems and scales, and linger through time, affecting millions of people and contributing to food insecurity, poverty, and inequality. Climate change is increasing temperatures and disrupting rainfall patterns, increasing the frequency, severity, and duration of droughts in many regions across the globe. As we move towards a 2˚C warmer world, urgent action is required to better understand and more effectively manage drought risk to reduce the devastating toll on human lives and livelihoods, and ecosystems. This report explores the systemic nature of drought and its impacts on achievement of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the SDGs and human and ecosystems' health and wellbeing.

2015 is a critical year for the future of sustainable development. The 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction highlights the connections between disaster risk and development and shows that decades of experience in managing disasters and reducing climate and disaster risk have produced a wealth of knowledge and good practice which can be applied to achieve sustainable development. The reduction of poverty, the improvement of health and education for all, the achievement of sustainable and equitable economic growth and the protection of the health of the planet now depend on the management of disaster risks in the day-to-day decisions of governments, companies, investors, civil society organizations, households and individuals. Strengthened disaster risk reduction is essential to making development sustainable.