Contemporary ways of understanding and assessing risk often consider the status quo and rarely look into how risk in systems has been shaped over a period of time the report says.
For example, in the context of COVID-19, in the old city of Ahmedabad, the percentages of population residing in a one-room household or with more than five people living in a household appeared to be dominant factors in the spread of the disease. This is the result of historical socioeconomic realities.
Thus, recurrence of a similar outbreak would lead to comparable consequences if these underlying vulnerabilities were not addressed.
An important takeaway for policymakers in this regard is to investigate such contemporary and historical causes of social and economic vulnerabilities, so they can be addressed through integration of risk reduction within contexts that perpetuate vulnerability and generate risk.
The Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction titled ‘Our World at Risk: Transforming Governance for resilient Future 2022’, while discussing the challenge, reminded the world about COVID-19 that has heightened existing vulnerabilities in health systems.
Moreover, it has exacerbated inequality and unemployment. People became miserable both particularly in urban areas having serious consequences on education, nutrition and food security along with other SDG goals. The systemic impacts of the pandemic and the pattern is shown in a recent study (2022) conducted in the old city of Ahmedabad, a World Heritage City in India.
The report points out about the risks of rapid urbanization which is making people more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, in part due to the concentration of large cities in coastal area subject to the impacts of sea-level rise.
Since 2006, the average sea level rise rate has increased to 3.7 mm per year as per the latest IPCC report. It is projected that by 2100, about 200 million people in the world will be affected by it with most of those in Asia, in particular China (43 million), Bangladesh (32 million), and India (27 million).
