By John H. Patterson and Topher L. McDougal
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Part of the problem is that DRR is just not very marketable. The UN’s humanitarian aid coordination arm, OCHA, can list Beyoncé and Forest Whitaker as collaborators; the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, has Angelina Jolie; and the UN Development Programme recently added Yemi Alade to a list of goodwill ambassadors that already included the likes of Padma Lakshmi and Antonio Banderas. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDRR, has none.
Disaster risk reduction is so un-Instagramable, in fact, that the UNDRR does not have an Instagram account. If international aid were a movie about the American high school experience, humanitarians would be the jocks, development experts the student council, and DRR, undoubtedly, the nerds.
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It is time to inject some urgency into the DRR agenda. Investing in disaster risk reduction isn’t a matter of saving for a rainy day; it’s jerking the wheel to avoid the boulder that is quite clearly on the road ahead. People should not have to be starving, buried under rubble, or flooded out of their homes before the world pays attention.
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And while humanitarians rush around the world, chasing the biggest storms and the most garish civil wars, or development actors roll out silver-bullet projects sure to be sustainable (this time), the window to implement the DRR programmes that could actually save and improve lives grows ever more narrow.
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