Leave no one behind: Global Platform 2025 champions inclusive disaster risk reduction

The Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction 2025 placed inclusion at the center of building resilient communities, with an intentional focus on ensuring that disaster risk reduction strategies address the needs of women, persons with disabilities, and other most at-risk groups. Throughout the five-day gathering, delegates, practitioners, and community leaders demonstrated that resilience can only be achieved when no one is left behind.

The platform's second key theme, "Prioritizing gender equality, accessibility and inclusion to leave no one behind," resonated across preparatory days, formal sessions, learning labs, and side events, reinforcing that while disasters affect everyone, they disproportionately impact certain groups including women, persons with disabilities, and older persons, and when these groups are empowered to lead risk reduction efforts we all benefit.

Breaking barriers and building commitment

The RISK Award Ceremony 2025 highlighted how inclusion drives innovation in disaster risk reduction. ChildFund International won the €100,000 award for empowering indigenous children and youths in Bolivia's Chiquitano Nation to lead emergency preparedness by combining ancestral knowledge with modern technology.

"The Risk Award is an honour to ChildFund in Bolivia, its partners but, most importantly, to the Chuiquitano People, who will bridge their ancestral indigenous wisdom with new technologies to empower children to get on the frontline of Disaster Risk Reduction," said Ms. Ximena Loza, Country Director for Bolivia.

The Global Platform's Gender Pledge Wall became a powerful symbol of commitment, with 165 pledges from participants, including 34 from Governments, including the making concrete pledges to advance gender equality in their disaster risk reduction work. The pledges ranged from policy commitments to grassroots initiatives, creating a commitment of action spanning all levels of society.

"I strongly believe our solutions must be gender-responsive. If we listen, engage, and invest in what works for women, we can build solutions that work for everyone," emphasized Kamal Kishore, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The Inclusion Hub served as a central gathering space fostering dialogue between persons with disabilities, women leaders, and policymakers. With 147 persons with disabilities registered for the Global Platformand nearly 500 participants expressing interest in disability inclusion in disaster risk reduction, the event demonstrated significant engagement from the disability community and allies affiliated with the disability stakeholder group.

Inclusion Hub sessions covered critical areas including inclusive disaster risk governance for effective risk management, gender-responsive and socially inclusive understanding of disaster risk, risk-informed development approaches, and financing gender-responsive and socially inclusive resilience building. These discussions demonstrated the platform's commitment to not just talking about inclusion but creating it in practice.

Integrating inclusion throughout the Platform

UNDRR / Antoine Tardy

Inclusion was integrated throughout the Global Platform, from technical sessions on early warning systems to informal discussions on community preparedness. This represented a fundamental shift in how the disaster risk reduction community approaches resilience building, moving beyond treating inclusion as a separate topic to integrating it into every conversation.

Whether discussing early warning systems, risk communication, or preparedness planning, speakers consistently emphasized that effective solutions must be designed with and for the most marginalized. The platform revealed how inclusion manifests differently across various disaster risk reduction challenges. In early warning systems, it means ensuring alerts reach everyone through accessible formats and trusted community channels. In risk assessment, it requires disaggregated data that captures how different groups experience hazards. In preparedness planning, it demands meaningful participation from women, persons with disabilities, older persons, and indigenous communities as leaders and decision-makers, not merely as beneficiaries.

A key message is that communities who have been excluded from DRR governance possess critical knowledge and capabilities that benefit us all. Indigenous forecasting methods, women's community networks, and disability advocates' understanding of accessibility barriers emerged as essential resources for building resilient societies. Sessions highlighted successful examples where traditional wisdom enhanced modern early warning systems and where community-led initiatives achieved stronger outcomes.

The conversations also confronted persistent gaps honestly. Despite years of commitments, persons with disabilities continue to face significant barriers in accessing disaster services, women remain underrepresented in disaster risk reduction leadership, and intersectional vulnerabilities-such as those faced by adolescent girls with disabilities-often remain invisible to planners and responders.

A Special Session on Progress Implementing The Gender Action Plan to Support Implementation of the Sendai Framework (Sendai GAP) highlighted progress that has been made over the past year since the Sendai GAP was launched. Success stories highlighted the impact that gender-responsive disaster risk reduction has had across diverse stakeholders, from disaggregated data informing budget allocations in Burundi, to how the Sendai GAP implementation tools have supported Kiribati; how women leadership has expanded across Mali, to how the transgender community in Pakistan has worked with provincial government to ensure inclusive disaster risk reduction is inclusive of all.

Looking ahead

As the Global Platform concluded, the message was clear: inclusion is not an add-on to disaster risk reduction-it is fundamental to its success. The path forward requires strengthening data collection to better understand how disasters affect different groups while scaling successful models like community-based early warning systems that integrate traditional knowledge and ensure accessibility for all.

Equally important is investing in leadership development for women, persons with disabilities, and most at-risk communities to take central roles in disaster risk reduction planning and implementation. This shift demands embedding inclusion requirements into national and local disaster risk reduction strategies with dedicated resources and accountability mechanisms, while leveraging innovation to develop accessible early warning systems and preparedness resources that serve everyone effectively.

The Global Platform 2025 demonstrated that when inclusion guides disaster risk reduction efforts, communities become stronger and more resilient. As climate change continues to intensify disaster risks, the imperative to leave no one behind has never been more urgent-or more achievable.

The outcomes from Global Platform 2025 will inform the midterm review of the Sendai Framework implementation, ensuring that inclusion remains central to global disaster risk reduction efforts through 2030 and beyond.