Tools for Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction: Guidance notes for development organizations

The development process does not necessarily reduce vulnerability to natural hazards. Instead, it can unwittingly create new forms of vulnerability or exacerbate existing ones, impeding efforts to reduce poverty and promote growth, sometimes with tragic consequences. ‘Win-win’ solutions for securing sustainable development, reducing poverty and strengthening hazard resilience, therefore, need to be explicitly and actively sought, particularly as climate change looks set to increase the incidence of droughts and floods and the intensity of windstorms. Such solutions are best derived by integrating disaster risk reduction strategies and measures within the overall development framework, viewing disaster risk reduction as an integral component of the development process rather than as an end in its own right.

Since the late 1990s, there has been increasing recognition of this need to ‘mainstream’ disaster risk reduction into development – that is, to consider and address risks emanating from natural hazards in medium-term strategic frameworks and institutional structures, in country and sectoral strategies and policies and in the design of individual projects in hazard-prone countries. A number of development organisations have begun efforts to mainstream disaster risk reduction into their work, undertaking various related institutional, policy and procedural changes and adjusting operational practice.

This ProVention project on Tools for Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction supports this process, providing a series of 14 guidance notes for use by development organisations in adapting programming, project appraisal and evaluation tools to mainstream disaster risk reduction into development work in hazard-prone countries. The guidelines are deliberately intended as short, practical briefs supplementing existing, more general, guidelines on programming, appraisal and evaluation tools.

The series covers the following subjects: (1) Introduction; (2) Collecting and using information on natural hazards; (3) Poverty reduction strategies; (4) Country programming; (5) Project cycle management; (6) Logical and results-based frameworks; (7) Environmental assessment; (8) Economic analysis; (9) Vulnerability and capacity analysis; (10) Sustainable livelihoods approaches; (11) Social impact assessment; (12) Construction design, building standards and site selection; (13) Evaluating disaster risk reduction initiatives; and (14) Budget support.

The full guidance note series is contained in this volume. Additional copies are available online at http://www.proventionconsortium.org/mainstreaming_tools

A web-based Disaster Risk Reduction Monitoring and Evaluation Source book is also under development as part of the same ProVention project. This source book will be available at http://www.proventionconsortium.org/M&E_sourcebook later in 2007.

Source: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies / the ProVention Consortium.