Evaluating risk from a holistic perspective to improve resilience: the United Nations evaluation at global level

Disaster risk is not only associated with the occurrence of intense hazard events but also with the vulnerability conditions that facilitate disasters when such events occur. Vulnerability is closely linked to social processes and governance weaknesses in disaster-prone areas, and is usually related to a set of fragilities, susceptibilities, and issues regarding the lack of resilience of the exposed human settlements. The holistic risk assessment aims to reflect risk from a comprehensive perspective by using, in one hand, the physical risk or potential physical damage directly linked to the occurrence of hazard events and, on the other hand by capturing how underlying risk drivers or amplifiers –social, economic, environmental issues, non-hazard dependent elements, worsen the current existing physical risk conditions in terms of lack of capacity to anticipate or resist, or to respond and recover from adverse impacts. This article presents the results of the holistic evaluation of risk as well as of the implications of risk for development obtained at global level in the framework of the UN Atlas-GAR: Unveiling Disaster Risk, using the probabilistic physical risk results, obtained from the multi-hazard Global Risk Assessment 2015, socioeconomic indicators and macroeconomic flow variables available in worldwide databases for more than 200 countries and territories. These results are useful to identify risk drivers that are associated not only to the physical vulnerability of countries’ assets but also to social, economic and financial issues that should be examined and tackled in a comprehensive wayPeer Reviewe