- Home
- Sustainable Development Goals
- Life on Land
Life on Land
Applying the biotrade principles and criteria
This session shared practical experiences of practitioners implementing the BioTrade Principles and Criteria (P&C) as well as challenges and lessons learned by biodiversity-based SMEs involved in BioTrade. The session also provided insights on efforts to upscale the use of the BioTrade P&C.
Opening of the 2019 biotrade congress
With over 1 million species reported to be at risk of extinction by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) addressing the biodiversity crisis is not only an environmental issue but also an economic and social issue as well. Biodiversity loss is undermining human health and livelihoods threatens food security as well as economic stability as approximately 40 per cent of the world’s economy is derived from the direct use of biodiversity. Nevertheless there are opportunities to curb this trend if urgent action is taken by individual consumers governments the private sector academia and society as a whole from the local to the global level including in the way we trade.
Droughts: the lived experience
This chapter provides a link between the presentation of drought and related hazards exposure and vulnerabilities in Chapter 1 and the options and pathways for avoiding risks and building resilience in Chapter 3. Through the lived experience of coping with and responding to drought this chapter explores the current understanding of drought supplemented where necessary with accounts of the wide range of impacts response and adaptation actions. It looks at the extent to which society understands and manages drought and its systemic characteristics causes impacts and lingering effects including the efficiency of drought planning responsive actions support services and the adaptive learning challenge that this presents. This chapter also analyses the key features of hazard exposure and vulnerability through the lens of climate change and related drivers. The case studies and the challenges described in this chapter explore the historical current and prospective policies and practices applied in recent droughts.
Foreword
The GAR Special Report on Drought 2021 comes at a pivotal moment as the world reflects on how it should deal with the threats various risks pose to sustainable development. As the Covid-19 pandemic has made tangible for so many hazardous events that may have been thought of as being confined to a sector or spatially and temporally limited can quickly transform into crises with long-lasting globally catastrophic social ecological and economic consequences.
Executive summary
The risks that drought poses to communities ecosystems and economies are much larger and more profound than can be measured. The impacts are borne disproportionately by the most vulnerable people. Drought impacts are extensive across societies – they interconnect across large areas cascade through socioecological and technical systems at different scales and linger through time. A lack of awareness of such characteristics including the consistent underestimation of the cost of drought impacts can lead to ineffective response and systemic failure. As understanding of the globally networked aspects of drought and other complex risks improves the changes required to reduce risk and improve the experience of drought become possible. This Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) Special Report on Drought 2021 aims to take a clear step forward in building that awareness.
Conclusions
The Sendai Framework makes clear that disaster risk cannot be substantially reduced unless the dynamic and systemic nature of risk is better understood and governance systems evolve to better incorporate systems-based and adaptive approaches. New tools for risk-informed decision-making are essential to allow human societies to live and thrive in uncertainty (UNDRR 2019). Much can be learned from these tools.
Droughts: from risk to resilience
Drought poses substantial risk to societies and ecosystems around the world. The case studies reviewed in Chapter 2 illustrate the challenge that communities and governments at local to global scales face in recognizing and responding to drought risk. No two droughts are the same; no single formula to manage them is sufficient. The continuum and feedbacks among varieties of drought events and drivers impacts warnings and ongoing responses are immensely complex. These include interactions at multiple time and space scales that range from global trade to the everyday insecurities and coping activities experienced by those people most at risk. Risk assessment and management strategies are increasingly challenged by such systemic and evolving impacts of extremes variability and change across time and space.
Modernizing current understanding of drought
Droughts are among the most complex and severe climate-related hazards encountered with wide-ranging and cascading impacts across societies ecosystems and economies. They are recurrent can last from a few weeks to several years and affect large areas and populations around the world. Droughts have occurred throughout history due to natural climate variability.
Frameworks for resilience
Building resilience to drought will rely primarily on national action. But national efforts should also be set within a framework of regional cooperation. This chapter reviews the actions taken by four ASEAN countries and the regional mechanisms developed by ASEAN and ESCAP that feed into the Sustainable Development Goals.
Slow but devastating — droughts in south-east asia
South-East Asia has been affected by a series of droughts often triggered by El Niño events. Though starting slowly droughts can have devastating cumulative impacts – hitting hardest at the poor and heightening inequality as well as degrading land and increasing the prospects of violent conflict. There are many more dry years ahead and the area affected is likely to shift and expand with more parts of the region exposed to extreme drought conditions.
Priorities for action
ASEAN member States already have many institutions and programmes that address drought. But in the future the region is likely to face many more dry years that will put even greater stress on poor communities. Alleviating poverty and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals will therefore depend critically on building drought resilience into all relevant policies and programmes.
Acknowledgments
This publication Ready for the Dry Years: Building resilience to drought in South-East Asia is a joint product of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) under the leadership of Kaveh Zahedi Deputy Executive Secretary for Sustainable Development of ESCAP Tiziana Bonapace Director of ICT and Disaster Risk Reduction Division of ESCAP and H.E. Mr. Vongthep Arthakaivalvatee Deputy Secretary-General of ASEAN for ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community from 2015 to 2018.
Forewords
South-East Asia has many dry years ahead. This should come as no surprise. Many parts of the region have regularly been stricken by droughts that have destroyed crops heightened fire risks and led to acute shortages of drinking water. The hardest hit are the poor especially farming communities that rely on regular rainfall for their annual crops and who have few resources to fall back on during periods of rain shortfall. They are already likely to live on the degraded land that is most vulnerable to the effects of drought.