Un Institutions Doing Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation

Disaster risk reduction (DRR) became a subject of strong, intense, and contentious international political negotiations for perhaps the first time in its history during the Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction organised by the United Nations in Sendai, Japan, in March 2015. Some of the key notions of the Sustainable Development Goals and the climate change agenda appeared substantively in the DRR agenda. An example is the ‘Common but differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR) principle, enshrined in the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development’s Rio Declaration and mentioned in the UNFCCC principles (Article 3.1). Though the DRR meetings had been rather consensual in the past (Revet 2012), the Sendai negotiations witnessed tensions between less wealthy and more affluent countries.