Planetary Health and Disaster Risk Reduction: the Sendai Framework at its Midpoint

As we enter the last five years of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, institutions and organisations signal new approaches to governing natural hazards.

For most of the last 30 years, separate multilateral environmental agreement bodies like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, have considered environmental risks independently, in siloed ways. These structures convene different stakeholders working at a similar challenge—how to improve, fund, and structure environmental and risk management with effective implementation at the national level. These bodies are where many in the planetary health community of practice focus efforts. Over the same period, countries have also progressively been looking at “disaster” risk more broadly, utilizing regional and global platforms and sequential intergovernmental agreements. The Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction, adopted by 187 countries in 2015, aims to enhance resilience to diverse hazards across scales until 2030. The Framework celebrated its midpoint milestone in 2023 in a High-Level United Nations (UN) General Assembly event that informally serves as an important gauge on planetary health governance.

The Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework's implementation came at a time when long-standing views on disaster management are shifting across institutions. Actors are moving out of their comfort zones and rethinking their mandates. Concurrent, cascading environmental risks bring separate domains increasingly together. The growing intersection of disaster, climate, and biodiversity regimes creates interesting opportunities for institutional synergies, now, and post-2030.