High-level Conference on Gender-responsive and Disability-inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction Policies and Management

Natural and human-made hazards have become increasingly frequent, with the capacity to ruin people’s lives and livelihoods. As such, they constitute major security risks, also within the OSCE-area.

Effective protection of the population requires inclusive, accessible, and non-discriminatory disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies and management, paying special attention to and allowing for the participation of people disproportionately affected by disasters.  Governments across and beyond the OSCE region have committed to inclusive DRR, but implementation is slow.

To raise awareness of persisting gaps and barriers to gender-responsive and disability-inclusive DRR, and to identify good practices and recommended action to overcome them, the OSCE Gender Issues Programme in co-operation with the Government of Japan organized this high-level conference.

The OSCE with its comprehensive approach to security plays an important role in strengthening resilience to disasters, which enables the Organization to address disaster risks from different perspectives and at different levels. The Office of the Coordinator of the OSCE Environmental and Economic activities (OCEEA) is mandated to address disaster risk reduction and implements relevant activities to strengthen the disaster-risk reduction capacities in the OSCE area. 

The event was the conclusion of a series of activities to explore how gender and disability affect vulnerabilities and in natural disaster, enhancing sub-regional and international co-operation among relevant DRR government bodies and organizations working with disability and gender equality. These activities included two online sub-regional expert roundtable discussions, on Central Asia and Mongolia on 22 November and on South-Eastern Europe on 23 November.

The conference was implemented as part of the extra-budgetary project “WIN - Women and Men Innovating and Networking for Gender Equality”