Recently released by the World Bank, Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters finds that extreme natural disasters cost the global economy $520 billion in lost consumption each year – 60 percent higher than any previous estimate. Traditional disaster risk assessments have focused solely on aggregate losses, or how “disasters affect people wealthy enough to have wealth to lose.” But, as the report points out, a dollar in losses does not mean the same thing to the wealthy as it does to the poor. Instead, the report uses a new measurement that moves beyond asset losses to estimate a community’s socioeconomic resilience – or the ability to resist, absorb, accommodate, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely manner.

Climate change is projected to produce more intense and frequent extreme weather events, multiple weather disturbances, along with broader climatological effects, such as sea level rise. These are almost certain to have significant direct and indirect social, economic, political, and security implications during the next 20 years. These effects will be especially pronounced as populations continue to concentrate in climate-vulnerable locales such as coastal areas, water-stressed regions, and ever-growing cities.

Out of the ashes of World War II, the United Nations (UN) was founded to maintain global peace, rights and security. Today, the world is a dramatically different place. Since 1945 the UN has helped institutionalise human rights across the world, assisted millions of refugees fleeing persecution and built agreement to address emergent global challenges like climate change. These successes are grounds for hope, not complacency. Since 1945, the risks to international peace and security have also transformed. Today, our international systems are faced with interconnected and increasingly prolonged periods of challenge and volatility. And climate risk is threatening the United Nation’s very mission to maintain peace, rights and security. Peacebuilding efforts are unravelling where communities compete for access to climate stressed food and water supply. People are migrating from resource depressed climates in search of stability and challenging the UN’s ability to deliver humanitarian aid at scale. And amidst multiple crises, the capacity to prioritise fundamental pillars of UN governance such as human rights and international law is thinly spread. United We Stand is released as the race for the new Secretary General gets underway. The new UNSG must radically reform the UN to make it fit for purpose in a climate changed world or see its core mission undermined.

In this report, Luca Bergamaschi, Nick Mabey, Jonathan Gaventa and Camilla Born from E3G explore practical actions that EU foreign policy institutions could undertake to manage climate risk and an orderly global transition. Read on for a summary of the report here.