A Tale of Two Conferences Part I: UNDRR Global Platform 2025

(In-depth read, 18 min)

TLDR/Summary

• Global disaster costs are exploding while responses lag: Direct losses have reached US$200 billion annually, but cascading effects arguably push the true cost to $2 trillion. Despite the comprehensive Sendai Framework adopted by 187 countries, disaster impacts are actually increasing globally.
• The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) Global Platform (Geneva, June 2–6) made some progress: Thousands gathered with genuine commitment, the World Bank has pivoted to prioritize 80% of disaster funding toward prevention, and there was acknowledgment that current frameworks need to be “more dynamic and powerful” by 2030.
• We’re trapped in a systemic bind: The conference focused on early warning, coordination and engagement issues, specific hazards and financing, touching only lightly on the global stressors resulting from present day human systems that generate risks with increasing rapidity and intensity.
• There was little discussion of exponential technologies that generate new vulnerabilities faster than we can assess or regulate them, while increasing global connectivity makes systems more fragile to cascading failures.
• The meeting missed the deeper “metacrisis“, ignoring the competitive and evolutionary dynamics between nations and corporations that prevent needed collective action. Individually rational decisions lead to collectively destructive outcomes. Disaster risk reduction remains inadequate due to short-term competitive pressures that reward immediate advantage over long-term survival.
• Small islands illustrate the impossible position: Island nations face disaster costs up to 64% of GDP from single events, yet they can’t control the global climate, sea level rise or economic systems that generate many risks they face.
• Real resilience requires transformation: Rather than just better disaster response, we need to change the fundamental incentive structures and governance mechanisms that generate cascading disasters in the first place.
• The world’s current trajectory points to a “hard landing”: My assessment is that without addressing underlying drivers, the mismatch between accelerating risks and response capacity likely means a “hard landing” is ahead. That is, systemic reorganisation in coming decades with reduced global living standards.
• Bottom Line: The UNDRR conference showed remarkable dedication to resilience, but until we address the systemic stressors generating risks faster than we can manage them, and the game-theoretic and evolutionary drivers of those stressors, then we’ll remain stuck in an increasingly dangerous reactive cycle.
• In Part II of this ‘Tale of Two Conferences’ I’ll present a dash of hope from the second meeting I attended, the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (Paris, June 7–9), which countered some of the despair I felt following the UN Global Platform… Watch this space…

The 2025 UN Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction

The costs of disasters continue to spiral upward. In 2020 alone, direct disaster losses reached $200 billion annually, but when cascading and ecosystem impacts are included, the true cost balloons to an estimated $2 trillion. Meanwhile, risks are growing faster than our capacity to address them, disaster risk reduction financing remains woefully inadequate, and high-income countries are discovering they’re not immune—just weeks ago, a Swiss village was wiped off the face of the Earth by a glacier collapse.

Against this backdrop, the UNDRR 2025 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction convened in Geneva, bringing together thousands of stakeholders to advance the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. The meeting culminated in an eight-point call to action.

I attended representing Islands for the Future of Humanity, a non-partisan New Zealand charity think tank, focused on enhancing understanding of global catastrophic risk and mitigation options, through technical research, blogs, collaborative webinars, and other resources available to all for free.

The UN conference structure was comprehensive: keynotes, plenaries, high-level sessions, and learning labs, all open to diverse stakeholders. Yet while the discussions were wide-ranging and often insightful, they revealed a critical blind spot that may undermine all our disaster risk reduction efforts: a failure to grapple with the deeper systemic forces, what some analysts call the “polycrisis” and the “metacrisis”, that are driving humanity’s accelerating risk trajectory.

Setting the Stage: Where We Stand

To understand what was missing, it’s worth reviewing where we stand.

The Sendai Framework, adopted by 187 countries in 2015, provides a comprehensive approach to reducing disaster risk through four priority areas:

• Understanding disaster risk
• Strengthening governance
• Investing in resilience
• Enhancing preparedness for “Build Back Better” recovery.

The aim is to meet seven global targets by 2030, including substantially reducing disaster mortality, economic losses, and damage to critical infrastructure.

The 2023 Sendai Midterm Review revealed mixed progress at best. While some advancement had been made since 2015, disaster impacts are actually increasing and setting back development gains globally. There’s a significant disconnect between policy development and actual practice, with disaster response still prioritised over prevention. Major shortfalls persist in disaster risk reduction funding, meaningful stakeholder inclusion, and international cooperation. COVID-19 exposed critical risk governance weaknesses and missed opportunities for “building back better.”

The recently adopted UN Pact for the Future (2024) acknowledges in its second paragraph that humanity is “confronted by rising catastrophic and existential risks” that could lead to “persistent crisis and breakdown.” It explicitly recognises nuclear war as an existential threat (p.12) and addresses biorisks, climate urgency, and complex global shocks. Yet implementation mechanisms remain underdeveloped.

This year the 2025 UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) reported that five hazards—earthquakes, floods, storms, droughts, and heatwaves—drive 95% of economic losses (this of course omits pandemics, which result in more harm than all other disasters combined!). The report notes that the cost of disasters is rising year-on-year and that many impacts are not quantified by key international databases (see Figure).

But these statistics don’t yet include the potential for truly catastrophic tail risks and the 2025 GAR report makes a crucial observation:

The greatest under-estimation of the potential future disaster costs is the blind spot in accounting for possible 1-in-100 or even 1-in-1,000-year events—those that, while having a low probability of occurring can cause catastrophic impacts when they do (p.27).

Our own research concurs with this sentiment and we have previously argued for such low probability high-impact scenarios to be formally included in national risk assessments. Expected annualised harms from catastrophic tails risks, on some analyses, are many fold higher than the sum of impacts of common disasters.

Finally, the new UNDRR Hazard Information Profiles 2025 attempt to standardise hazard classification but reveal telling omissions. While they include nuclear agents and radioactive materials as technological hazards, there’s no mention of nuclear war or nuclear winter, despite “armed conflict” being listed elsewhere. Pandemic risks are covered, as are catastrophic asteroid impacts and large volcanic eruptions, but there’s no discussion of food shortages or famines—despite historical evidence that major volcanic eruptions have triggered both through climate impacts.

The 2025 UNDRR Global Platform: Familiar Themes, Persistent Gaps

With the above context in mind, I attended the June 2–6 (Geneva, Switzerland) UNDRR 2025 Global Platform, which featured three preparatory events that set familiar themes:

• The Early Warnings for All Multistakeholder Forum aimed to advance global early warning systems by 2027 but identified persistent gaps: under-resourced systems, lack of forecasting data, and financing shortfalls.
• The Stakeholder Forum for Disaster Risk Recovery emphasised that stakeholders shouldn’t wait for ideal conditions to act, calling for fast, flexible, open-source data systems and the need to “build forward better” rather than just “build back better.”
• The World Resilience Recovery Forum launched a 10-point Action Plan, arguing we should stop prioritising speed of recovery over resilience.

These themes continued throughout the main conference. A panellist at the session on “Aligning the Sendai Midterm Review with the Pact for the Future” noted that by 2030, the world will need something more dynamic and powerful than current frameworks to meet emerging challenges. The emphasis on “risk-informed investment” was constant. We must stop creating risk through our investments as we build out complex infrastructure systems that create systemic vulnerabilities for those who depend on them.

Multiple sessions addressed financing, with the World Bank pivoting in recent times to providing 80% of disaster financing for risk reduction and preparedness and 0% to response without disaster risk reduction elements. This is a significant shift from 15 years ago when recovery was the focus. Yet the financing numbers discussed were manifestly disproportionate to the scale of the risks the world faces.

Infrastructure resilience received significant attention, with panellists discussing renewable energy transitions, governance transparency, universal accessibility, and nature-based solutions. Yet, evidence was cited that for every dollar invested in infrastructure, 50 cents is wasted due to organisational culture, corruption (or corporate greed/gaming), and similar inefficiencies. This is a sobering reminder that technical solutions alone are insufficient and systems and goals need to incentivise efficient behaviour (this may be particularly salient for the construction sector in my country of New Zealand).

The Systemic Risk Session: Missing the Mark

Perhaps most revealing was the session on “Understanding Systemic Risk.” Despite its promising title, the discussion largely focused on familiar territory: the need for cross-sector integration on risk, coordination mechanisms, strategic preparedness drills, incorporating Indigenous knowledge, and expanding beyond natural hazards to address social risks like health and food security.

Brendan Moon of the Australian National Emergency Management Agency described Australia’s National Coordination Mechanism that provides a model for genuine multi-stakeholder coordination that goes beyond information sharing to address responsibility and communication across sectors.

These are important topics, but they fundamentally missed what “systemic risk” actually means. The panellists discussed breaking down silos and improving coordination, necessary but insufficient responses to the deeper challenge of understanding why risks are accelerating faster than our capacity to manage them and failing to engage with the possibility that human systems could actually collapse under mounting stressors.

Ruth Richardson from the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA) provided one of the few insights that approached the real issue: We need to change the goals of our systems or we won’t overcome the problems. A food system should have the goal of providing nutritious food to everyone, not the goal of providing fast cheap food to whoever can pay.

She announced ASRA’s launch of STEER (still in beta), a system to assess systemic risks and guide action, calling for a radical increase in funding for this work. But even this may not dig deep enough into the polycrisis and metacrisis that is driving humanity’s predicament.

Do we face a Polycrisis?

Thomas Homer-Dixon, a systems theorist and founder of the Cascade Institute, frames the challenge as a debate between those who see our “polycrisis”—the interconnected set of global challenges from climate change to political instability to technological disruption—as merely “history happening” versus those who see it as the result of systemic flaws in our economic and political systems that are driving stressors that are inexorably leading to a dangerous disequilibrium in human systems.

Homer-Dixon identifies four meta-processes driving the polycrisis: increasing energy consumption, disruption to Earth’s energy balance, increasing human biomass, and increasing connectivity among human populations. These processes create conditions ripe for any future failures to cascade across highly connected, homogeneous systems. Exactly the kind of infrastructure networks we’re building out globally in terms of smart cities, global supply chains, food systems, or digital financial networks.

As connectivity increases without corresponding diversity in systems, we create systemic vulnerabilities. A pandemic can spread globally in weeks. A cyberattack can cascade across interconnected financial systems. Supply chain disruptions ripple through just-in-time production networks. Climate change affects agricultural systems worldwide simultaneously. Each trigger can propagate to a crisis and each crisis is a trigger for other crises.

This creates systemic risk.

Systemic Risk: the potential for multiple, increasingly severe, abrupt, differentiated yet interconnected, and potentially long-lasting and complex impacts on coupled natural and human systems – Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment

The great question is whether technological acceleration is net negative (contributing to these problems) or net positive (likely to solve them). This remains unknown, but what’s clear is that our current trajectory is unsustainable.

The Missing Metacrisis: Why Disaster Risk Reduction Can’t Keep Pace

The UNDRR Global Platform was largely focused on specific hazards, climate change adaptation, familiar themes of collaboration, community engagement, early warnings and financing. What wasn’t effectively discussed were the fundamental drivers of how humanity has ended up in a predicament where risks are increasing faster than our ability to respond. This a critical omission that undermines virtually all disaster risk reduction efforts.

Several analysts have previously identified this deeper pattern. Daniel Schmachtenberger describes what he terms a “metacrisis”. The metacrisis is characterised by systemic mechanisms underlying all other stressors and crises. Humanity is caught amid rivalrous dynamics where competition between actors (nations, corporations, individuals) prevents the coordination needed to address collective threats.  Exponential technological advancement creates new risks faster than we can assess or regulate them. Resource degradation accelerates while coordination failures prevent effective response. This has led to what Schmachtenberger calls a “sensemaking crisis”—we literally don’t see the problem at the right level of analysis and don’t understand it.

The result is a kind of systemic trap. If we continue on our current path, Schmachtenberger argues, we face either chaotic breakdown or totalitarian restriction of freedoms as authorities attempt to manage escalating crises. Neither outcome preserves what we value about human civilisation. The challenge is to find a “third attractor,” namely a path that avoids both outcomes through fundamental systemic change.

I did not hear this conversation at the UNDRR Global Platform – literally the world’s premiere meeting on disaster risk.

The problematic dynamic has been described metaphorically in terms of “Moloch” (a word sometimes used to describe an ancient bull-headed demon) – a situation where individually rational decisions lead to collectively irrational and destructive outcomes. Each actor, whether a nation, corporation, or individual, faces incentives that make immediate competitive advantage more important than long-term collective survival. It is a classic but nuanced game-theoretic bind, from which we may fail to escape.

Both Homer-Dixon and Schmachtenberger point to a crucial insight: elite institutions and individuals often lack the cognitive framework to understand these meta-level dynamics. They remain focused on specific problems rather than the systemic patterns that generate multiple problems simultaneously.

The Consequences of Missing the Metacrisis

This analytical blind spot has profound implications for disaster risk reduction. All the coordination mechanisms, financing innovations, data and technological solutions discussed at the UNDRR conference operate within a system that continues generating risks faster than we can manage them, driven by forces beyond any agent’s control. It’s like trying to bail out a boat without addressing the fact that someone is drilling new holes in the hull.

Consider the disconnect: we know that investing in disaster risk reduction provides returns of 15:1 in some cases (meaning that $1 invested in disaster risk reduction averts $15 of recovery costs down the line). Yet financing remains inadequate. We know that “building back better” after disasters makes communities more resilient, yet political pressures consistently favour rapid reconstruction over thoughtful less hasty rebuilding that transforms communities into resilient ones. We know that early warning systems save lives, yet they remain under-resourced in the places that need them most.

These aren’t primarily technical problems—they’re systemic ones. The same competitive dynamics that create short-term thinking in corporate boardrooms operate in political systems, international negotiations, and even disaster response. The actor who takes time to build resilience may lose out to the actor who prioritises immediate returns.

Aside: Return on Investment for Disaster Risk Reduction

I actually sat down and produced a simple calculator to illustrate this point while waiting between conference sessions. The default values represent my country’s (NZ) GDP and annual disaster losses. You can see immediately the benefits to GDP growth of investing in disaster risk reduction, rather than merely recovery and rebuilding. If governments want to find extra percentage points of GDP growth this is how. You can even impute your own assumptions about the frequency and impact of large catastrophes and find the ideal GDP spend on disaster risk reduction under those assumptions (default model assumptions are at the bottom – note this is just a toy and greatly simplifies complex dynamics).

Small Island Developing States: A Microcosm of Global Challenges

Our charity Islands for the Future of Humanity focuses on the vulnerabilities and resilience options of remote island nations in the face of global catastrophe. The aim is to disseminate non-partisan information that helps ensure three goals:

1. That remote islands (including NZ and Australia) leverage their unique characteristics to protect the wellbeing of their populations (think successful Pacific Island border restrictions during Covid-19).
2. That islands generating surplus develop resilient structures and systems to ensure continued trade in critical goods and services, such as life-saving food during global catastrophe.
3. That remote islands develop global catastrophe resilience and mitigation mechanisms so that they might preserve complex integrated societies should major collapse impact the rest of the world.

In this context, I was interested in the UNDRR Global Platform’s session on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), which provided a particularly clear illustration of both the challenges and some potential solutions.

SIDS face disaster costs that can reach 64% of GDP for a single cyclone, an unsustainable burden that illustrates how existing systems fail to address truly systemic risks. There is no way that such impacts can be fully mitigated in cycles of disaster and perpetual recovery (note eg, my GDP impact calculator above), without the generative forces of polycrisis and metacrisis being addressed.

The Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS, introduced in 2024, attempts a more systemic approach. Rather than focusing only on disaster response, it aims to build resilient prosperity through enhanced financial access, climate action, and systematic monitoring frameworks. The emphasis on “trusting and using national systems”, rather than imposing external solutions, recognises that sustainable resilience must emerge from local capacity rather than outside intervention.

Yet even these SIDS initiatives operate within the global economic system that generates many of the risks they face. Small islands didn’t create climate change, but they bear disproportionate costs. They can build the most sophisticated early warning systems, but they can’t control global sea level rise or the hurricane patterns it affects.

This illustrates the fundamental challenge: effective disaster risk reduction increasingly requires addressing global systemic risks that no single actor can control.

The Path Forward: Thinking Beyond the Sendai Framework

As I reflected on the conference discussions, a troubling pattern emerged. Despite all the talk of coordination, collaboration, and systemic approaches, the fundamental drivers of accelerating risk remained largely unaddressed, even undiscussed.

This isn’t to dismiss the important work being done on specific disasters, early warning systems, or financing mechanisms. These efforts cost-effectively save lives and reduce suffering. But they operate within a larger system that continues generating risks faster than we can manage them.

One conference participant noted that, “the greatest risk we face today is failing to seize this chance to act boldly.”

I would argue that the greatest risk is failing to recognise the metacrisis drivers of the disaster risk that we face and continuing business and politics as usual while expecting different results.

As I noted above, one panellist at the 2025 UNDRR Global Platform was clear that by 2030, we’ll need something more dynamic and powerful than current frameworks to meet emerging challenges. This assessment is almost certainly correct, but it understates the magnitude of transformation required.

Given the widening mismatch between accelerating risks and our capacity to address their underlying drivers, the world is likely heading for what we might call a “hard landing.” Human systems will adapt, but with significant lag effects. This likely means a reduction in real GDP per capita globally and a drop in mean living standards across the coming decades, possibly accompanied by forced population decline from famine and other disasters as systems reorganise around new constraints.

This isn’t inevitable—there may be technological or social innovations that change the trajectory. But honest assessment suggests that our current approaches, however well-intentioned, are insufficient to address the scale and pace of change we’re experiencing.

The silver lining is that traumatic experiences can drive learning. The question is whether we can accelerate that learning process before the trauma becomes overwhelming.

Conclusion: Beyond Coordination to Transformation

The UNDRR 2025 Global Platform revealed both the commitment of participants and the limitations of current disaster risk reduction approaches. While the focus on coordination, breaking down silos, and scaling up financing addresses real needs, the conference revealed a critical blind spot: our failure to address the systemic forces generating risks faster than we can manage them.

Technical solutions can’t tackle the competitive dynamics, perverse incentives, and cognitive limitations that create what Schmachtenberger calls the metacrisis. Most participants genuinely want to build resilience, but they’re constrained by institutional and economic systems that make truly systemic solutions extremely difficult. It’s unclear whether any individual, organization, or state has sufficient agency to effect the needed changes.

Without frameworks for understanding these deeper patterns, disaster risk reduction remains reactive rather than transformative. We try to improve our responses to specific disasters while underlying dynamics continue accelerating overall risk.

This doesn’t mean abandoning current efforts, but embedding them within a larger understanding of systemic challenges. The real question isn’t whether we can coordinate better disaster responses, but whether we can transform the systems generating cascading disasters in the first place.

That transformation requires moving beyond technical fixes to address fundamental incentive structures, governance mechanisms, and cognitive frameworks shaping human systems. It’s more difficult than improving early warning systems or scaling financing, but may be the only approach that can actually reduce risk trajectories.

UNDRR Global Platform 2025 participants demonstrated remarkable dedication to resilience. The question is whether future conferences will grapple with the deeper systemic changes that such resilience requires.

Watch for Part II of this Tale of Two Conferences where I’ll present content from the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment symposium (Paris, June 7-9). This will feature a dash of hope to counter the above despair…

‍