A climate risk management approach to disaster reduction and adaptation to climate change, UNDP Expert group meeting integrating disaster reduction with adaptation to climate change, Havana, June 17-19, 2002

Disaster occurrence and losses associated with extreme and increasingly not so extreme climate events have increased dramatically in recent years. While many of the emerging patterns of disaster risk are associated with natural hazards that show no tendency to increases in magnitude and recurrence, human interventions in the natural\ environment are generating new socio-natural hazards, mainly associated with climate events. In many incidences of new flooding, landslide, drought, forest fire and coastal erosion, environmental degradation has transformed natural resources into new hazards. At the same time, the social, economic, territorial, physical and political vulnerability of populations in many developing countries continues to worsen, weakening their capacity to absorb the impact of and recover from extreme climate events.