Frontiers of water-related disaster management and the way forward

Our world has been witnessing a consistent rise in water-related disasters in recent years. Water-related disasters refer to meteorological events such as cyclones and storms; hydrological events such as floods; and climatological events such as extreme temperatures, drought, and forest fires. Such disasters derail sustainable development, making it paramount to embed water-related disaster resilience into the Sustainable Development Goals. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has made disaster risk reduction even more challenging.

The key points of this publication are:

• Effective disaster risk management (DRM) requires scaling efforts to leverage water hazard data as much as possible.
• Due to the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, disaster risk reduction has become even more challenging.
• Human capacity development (public education and literacy, empowerment of local governments and community leaders, and media briefings) by adequately addressing the local knowledge and wisdom is a necessity for future policy frameworks.
• Effective disaster preparation, warning, response, and recovery are best made when local governments and organizations work well together and coordinate with organizations on the national level.
• Effective governance is one of the most essential elements of an overall DRM strategy.
• For future dialogues, additional focus should be on identifying best practices related to using stateof-the-art technology to enable efficient governance for DRM.