Is national disaster legislation ready for climate change?

To address increasing disaster risk, this paper calls for an urgent shift that is needed in disaster risk management (DRM), from post-event action towards forward looking resilience planning. As an important part of this, many countries could improve and modernize their national legislation. Researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) looked at one of the most significant risks – floods. They found that outdated national legislation related to DRM laws, which omits the dynamic and critical aspects of risk, can hamper governments’ ability to proactively prepare for flood risks and other hazards that are being exacerbated by climate change.

The paper concludes with four certain commitments governments should make when updating or creating DRM legislation to maximize the efficacy:

• Proactively take into consideration the impacts and risks associated with climate change;
• Create incentives in DRM-related laws for capacity-building in all human, social, physical, natural, and financial systems, with particular support for building natural capital;
• Regulate and ensure sufficient resources for the function- ing of information and knowledge management systems;
• Allocate resources to preventive measures to further a forward-looking and proactive approach in DRM legislation.