Agriculture Rural Development and Forestry

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.

Building resilience is increasingly recognized not just as a humanitarian or environmental imperative but as a fundamental pillar of sustainable economic development.

There is a stark mismatch between the increasing levels of global disaster risk detailed in previous chapters of this report and current investment in resilience.

Increasing risk when combined with inadequate resilient investment poses a major threat to sustainable development.

Disasters are happening more frequently and exacting a greater toll on communities. Loss of life habitat loss of infrastructure and loss of livelihoods are eroding past development gains. In poorer nations – particularly LDCs SIDS and LLDCs – a single disaster event can have devastating consequences for the national economy.

Adaptation planning is a key mechanism through which national governments – as well as governments at other levels and non-state actors – identify technology-related needs and priorities.

Many adaptation technologies have existed and been deployed for many generations such as building houses on stilts to cope with flooding or irrigating crops to cope with erratic precipitation.