Responsible Consumption and Production

The Global Assessment Report (GAR) 2025: Resilience Pays: Financing and Investing for our Future highlights how smarter investment can reset the destructive cycle of disasters debt uninsurability and humanitarian need that threatens a climate-changed world. Disaster risk is increasing as more frequent and intense hazard events unsafe urbanization and ineffective development put more people and assets in harm’s way. Disasters are having profound macroeconomic impacts with direct losses estimated at $202 billion. When indirect and ecosystem costs are taken into account escalating disaster costs now surpass $2.3 trillion annually. There is an urgent need to transform how disaster risk is addressed amid a rapidly changing climate. Risk is no longer a peripheral issue but a systemic challenge that affects financial stability sustainability and equity. By embedding risk reduction into core policy and investment decisions it is possible to break the recurring cycle of shocks losses and debt. With the right choices resilience can become a foundation for long-term prosperity enabling societies not only to withstand disasters but to thrive despite them.

Building resilience is increasingly recognized not just as a humanitarian or environmental imperative but as a fundamental pillar of sustainable economic development.

There is a stark mismatch between the increasing levels of global disaster risk detailed in previous chapters of this report and current investment in resilience.

Increasing risk when combined with inadequate resilient investment poses a major threat to sustainable development.

Disasters are happening more frequently and exacting a greater toll on communities. Loss of life habitat loss of infrastructure and loss of livelihoods are eroding past development gains. In poorer nations – particularly LDCs SIDS and LLDCs – a single disaster event can have devastating consequences for the national economy.

ESCAP’s biennial series on financing for development publishes monographs on selected issues on financing for development from a regional Asia-Pacific perspective. The series aims to contribute to regional and national dialogues on strategies for the implementation of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This will be the fourth report of the series and to be published in 2021. The report will discuss policy options that countries in Asia and the Pacific can pursue to finance the SDGs and build back better from the COVID-19 pandemic. Three chapters are being prepared as part of this report as follows. Chapter 1 analyzes selected policies options proposed in the global FFD process in the context of Asia and the Pacific. Chapter 2 considers innovative financing mechanisms. Chapter 3 focuses on developing digital financing role in fostering sustainable development.

The financing needs to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were substantial even before the COVID-19 pandemic; US $1.5 trillion for the Asia-Pacific region or 5 per cent of the region’s combined GDP.