Preamble
Across the world, countries and regions face a wide range of natural hazards. When hazards interact with vulnerable populations, infrastructure, and ecosystems, they become disasters—causing loss of life, human suffering, disruption to essential services and livelihoods, environmental impacts, and economic loss. The consequences can extend beyond affected areas and across borders, disrupting interconnected systems such as supply chains, financial markets, and shared environmental resources.
Technology and international collaboration offer significant opportunities to strengthen resilience to natural hazards and disasters. Advances in Earth observation, remote sensing, early warning systems, numerical modeling, digital twins, drone technologies, and artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance understanding of hazards and risk, support decision-making, and strengthen preparedness, response, and recovery. Yet many promising technologies remain underutilized, inaccessible, or ineffectively deployed because of gaps in infrastructure, technical and financial capacity, interoperability, institutional alignment, and public trust. The risks that countries face are also evolving.
Population settlement in risk-prone areas, poorly planned urban expansion, unsustainable land-use practices, inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, and changes in environmental conditions can amplify the impacts of natural hazards. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that “human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.”
Together, these changing conditions reinforce the need for forward-looking assessments that are regularly updated to reflect evolving conditions and emerging risks. Therefore, the challenge is not only to develop new technologies, but also to ensure that existing technologies are effectively deployed, appropriately adapted, sustainably maintained, and equitably accessed. Through international collaboration, countries can share data, technology, expertise, and operational capabilities; strengthen resilience across interconnected systems; and ensure that scientific and technological advances translate into improved preparedness and resilience.
