BY DELISA THWALA
MBABANE– Present-day disaster risk management requires capacities and means to assess and manage risks in a holistic and integrated manner.
The National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) and United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) have introduced a three-day National Workshop on Systemic Risk Assessment in Eswatini.
The workshop will result in a shared vision on the systemic risk assessment work to take place in Eswatini concrete input into the development of a compressive risk information knowledge platform by drawing on the skills and capacities of all stakeholders.
NDMA Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Russell Dlamini said to this end, national authorities and UNDRR stakeholders need a risk assessment approach that will allow them to understand the systemic nature of risk, including in the development, humanitarian, and fragile state contexts.
In addition, Dlamini said despite global technological advances in generating risk information on hazards, vulnerability, exposure, and other factors such as climate change, and the advances in statistics generation, many countries still face challenges in making the information accessible and usable to decision-makers.
“Eswatini faces climatic events which pose threats to the society, economy, and the general well-being of the population. Mapping and measuring multi-hazard and inter-connected risks constitutes a critical input to effective disaster risk management,”
NDMA and UNDRR are collaborating for the development of a multi- hazard risk assessment the aim of which is to create a knowledge base for risk-informing development so that future investments increase the capacity of populations to withstand existing and future disaster risks.
To this Dlamini said the field of systemic risk assessment is a necessity and emerging community of practice, with few examples of applied research.
“Improving systemic risk knowledge and capabilities among national actors such as Ministries of Management, Finance, Disaster Risk Infrastructure, Labour, Agriculture, Transportation, Energy, National Planning, and other ministries, national research organisations, think tanks, and non-governmental organisations is approached by UNDRR through joined up action to better link theory to practice based on national circumstances and priorities,” said Dlamini.
A scoping study was commissioned by UNDRR in Eswatini to examine data availability, to identify the range of multiple hazards and sectors of high priority to national authorities for examination, and to inform considerations for modeling of impact chains and pathways through multiple systems.
In terms of the hazard, exposure and vulnerability data, the scoping study found that in general terms, enough data and information are available to support the generation of the required models and/or to allow the use of existing models for the systemic and cascading risk assessment.
Meanwhile, a UNDRR team representative said the expected outcomes of the three-day workshop were to ensure that all stakeholders are informed about and fully engaged in the systemic risk assessment process in Eswatini
“We need knowledge and experience on the current state of systemic risk understanding and risk reduction action are discussed in the Eswatini, highlighting current policy landscape and opportunities for enhancing coherence,” said the representative. Participants are expected to be involved in planning and implementation of activities with implications for disaster risk reduction.
