Our team had the intent to investigate the true state of Oceania’s Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) efforts. But what seems like a clear topic, quickly turned into a complex web of strategies, policies, and programs that all relate to DRR in some form or another.
The problem of trying to measure Disaster Risk Reduction efforts is born from its multifaceted meaning and has major implications for policymakers and practitioners who work in these areas who are trying to understand the data.
For some, disaster risk reduction, or DRR in short, is an increased effort to respond to hazards to minimize their damage. This may look like the ‘Trilogy Emergency Relief Application (TERA)’ system that’s being implemented [see my colleagues post for more info]. For others, it may be working on land tenure issues to support regional and urban planning strategies for resilient infrastructure development [see my colleagues post more info]. And for others, it may mean supporting the resilience of major economies and livelihoods of the communities and the country at large [see my post on resilient agriculture]. All of these initiatives fall under the auspices of disaster risk reduction.
So when we began our investigations of where Oceania stood as a region and how the many islands ranked comparatively, we began looking for global rankings that give us information on where Oceania fell.
We first looked at the two frameworks that specifically measured disaster risk reduction. The first, is the Hyogo Framework for Action [HFA]. Country’s self-report on a series of questions that related to their preparedness for a disaster and their efforts in building resiliency. When we looked at the meta-data, so many countries were missing and the last completed self-reports were from 2012. Probably not a good way to provide any information on the state of Oceania, or the individual countries.
So we turned to global indices that had a component of disaster risk reduction. We looked at the top five, World Risk Index put out by the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR), Global Climate Risk Index constructed by Germanwatch, Notre Dame Global Adaption Country Index, ND-GAIN, part of an initiative of the Notre Dame Research arm, a ‘Vulnerability to Climate Change’ dataset put out by Senior Fellow, David Wheeler under the Center for Global Development, and INFORM under a consortium of partners under the Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Center, under the umbrella of the European Commission.
All of the indices demonstrate a measurement that links to disaster risk reduction is some form or another, but due to loose terminology and the broad definition of DRR, these indices have a wide range of the story that they tell with their data.
Once we started to break apart each index, it became clear that each one has its own, unique determination of risk and disaster. Many of the indices used data across two or more themes, and within those themes, they had collected a variety of sub-indicators. Further, each index had a complex of the weighting system, issues with missing data, and challenges with incorrect data.
After understanding the limitations of each, we took a step back and grouped them based on their definition of Disaster Risk Reduction. What were they trying to measure? What types of risk were they assessing? Which one is best fit for the questions that we are trying to measure.
| Index | Economic | Social | Environmental | Governance |
| Hyogo Framework for Action Self-Reports: (2005-2015)
United Nations-Disaster Risk Reduction |
✓ | |||
| Sendai Framework for Self-Reports: (20015-to date)
United Nations-Disaster Risk Reduction |
✓ | |||
| World Risk Index
Integrated Research on Disaster Risk |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Global Climate Risk Index:
German watch |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| ND-GAIN: Readiness Index
Notre Dame Global Adaption Country Index |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| INFORM: Index for Risk Management
Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Center, European Commission |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
So we went back to the table to create a more narrow and concise definition of what Disaster Risk Reduction will mean for this project. We settled on a governance focused definition of DRR. What are governments doing to reduce the risk in their own countries? This includes everything from planning, to mobilizing resources, down to implementation quality.
Seemingly, the best aligned data source was the Hyogo Framework for Action Self-reports, and it’s successor, the Sendai Framework for Self-reports. However, even this data source has huge gaps. As you can see from the table below, many countries have not filled out their countries efforts since 2012, which reported the state of their DRR efforts from 2009-2011. Even if we were to use the information from these reports, they are outdated.
| Country | Hyogo self-report | Sendai self-report |
| Cook Islands | 2012 | 2017 |
| Fiji | 2014 | – |
| Marshall Islands | 2012 | – |
| Micronesia | 2012 | – |
| Nauru | 2012 | 2017 |
| Palau | 2012 | – |
| Samoa | 2012 | – |
| Solomon Islands | 2011 | – |
| Tonga | 2012 | 2017 |
| Tuvalu | – | 2017 |
| Vanuatu | 2012 | – |
Compiled from Prevention Web.
Further, when we dive into each individual report, they are full of measurement errors, inconsistencies, and data that seems to be arbitrarly filled in. In addition, the reports do not measure quality. For example, one question asks “Do you have a National Disaster Risk Reduction plan?” The respondents can answer Yes or No, and do not need to provide any supplemental information.
The UN-DRR fully understands these limitations, which is why they transitioned to using the Sendai Framework for self-reports. However, we still do not have real-time information on the state of the DRR for these countries. Our fieldwork will focus on collecting this missing information and attempt to provide our clients with up to date, quality data that they can use in their future disaster risk reduction efforts.