Disaster Forensics: Learning from the Past for a more Resilient Future

Hazard events turn into disasters when people, assets, or ecosystems are exposed to and vulnerable to their impacts, and when their adaptive capabilities have been overwhelmed. Decisions that result in unsafe land use, high poverty and food insecurity rates, low levels of preparedness, and unplanned urbanization can all contribute to increased disaster risks. These factors can combine with broader threats in today's globalized world, leading to compounding and cascading impacts. The challenge for all countries, particularly those with high levels of hazard exposure and vulnerability, is to build resilience to the cumulative impacts of frequent and extreme events, especially in the context of compounding and cascading impacts and interconnected poly-crises.

Forensic Investigations of Disasters (FORIN) aim to facilitate thorough and extensive studies that improve the understanding of disaster risk construction and offer policy options and evidence-based recommendations for better corrective and prospective approaches to disaster risk reduction integrated with development policy and processes. This involves identifying underlying causes, risk drivers, values, goals and entry points for decisionmaking so that systemic risks can be better recognized, evaluated, and addressed. FORIN was developed by the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk-International Program Office drawing on an international community of disaster researchers and risk reduction practitioners.

The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Global Assessment of Risk 2024 (GAR 2024) considers ten recent major disasters from around the globe to examine, from a forensic perspective, what caused them, given recent insights into the social construction of risk, and what can be learned to increase future disaster resilience. The cases range from heatwaves in Portugal and Indonesia, droughts in Central America and East Africa, floods in Jamaica and southern Africa, to wildfires in the US and Canada. When examining large, intensive disasters in areas that are densely populated and economically dynamic, the identification of key drivers and root causes can be difficult due to the complexity of processes involved in risk construction, the time over which risk has been accumulating, connections between risks, how disasters materialize in society, and other factors. On the other hand, extensive risk and disaster, which are experienced in rapidly growing, regionally dispersed, provide foresight of future intensive disaster if the present processes of risk construction continue. They are also where identifying prospective drivers of risk behind extensive disasters can be early warnings for increasing attention to development-based disaster risk reduction efforts that can avoid intensive disasters in the future. This approach is especially valuable in contexts where climate changes are exacerbating hazard occurrence and intensity. However, in all cases, resilience building efforts are not keeping up with magnitude of hazard impacts and there is a clear resilience gap that is costing lives and livelihoods.

GAR 2024 aims to apply modern insights to experience, to deliberately learn from the past to inform the future and to shape tomorrow's resilience. Major disasters, are often preceded by sequences of smaller events that expose the problems behind larger ones in the future - only the magnitude of the disaster changes. Applying a "disaster forensics" approach to recent major events, it attempts to unpack key elements of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure and the capacity and capabilities of people and governance systems that have contributed to several major recent disasters and to risk reduction. A basic premise of FORIN is that disaster risk and eventual disasters are social constructs based on the existence of potentially damaging physical events that are dominantly conditioned by societal perceptions, priorities, needs, demands, choices, decisions, and practices. Therefore, a series of central analytical themes and defining questions have been considered for the illustrative case studies. These questions address the characteristics and prior knowledge of hazards, exposure, and vulnerability. They also examined the extent to which policy and practice in land use and territorial planning, hazard-resistant building techniques, environmental management, and control over the creation of socio-natural hazards, poverty reduction and control over socio-spatial segregation of territory and unsafe settlement processes, including for new migrants to cities, and governance of risk, involving control over corruption have been enacted. They emphasize the importance and need to improve the capabilities of practitioners working with public, private, academic, and civil society partners in creating their own FORIN-informed storylines. The FORIN methodology emphasizes the importance of the creating a process of active learning from disasters that bridges disciplines and encourages learning rather than just post-disaster reviews. Encouragement to scale up application of these kinds of approaches, and to further refine its application are key to the recommendations. The GAR aims to encourage practitioners and policy makers to deliberately learn from the past to improve foresight and effect prospective risk reduction in the future in an increasingly risky world, and how this can contribute to climate change adaptation capacity, transformational adaptation, and early warning. The analysis presented in this GAR Report widens and deepens knowledge concerning disaster risk construction processes. The recommendations are framed around key messages for policymakers and practitioners to consider when modifying certain aspects of development and risk reduction practices in an increasingly interconnected and risky world. These actions and recommendations can inform disaster prevention and sustainable development planning, which also include climate change adaptation capacity, transformational adaptation, and early warning.