Getting Ahead of Disasters: A Charter on Finance for Managing Risks highlights the urgent need for collaborative action to manage risks and protect people in the most vulnerable countries from climate-related disasters.

It stresses that climate-related hazards and their impacts are increasingly predictable, and there is an opportunity to get ahead of disasters by using finance to protect development gains and reduce humanitarian needs. To address these challenges, the Charter calls for better collaboration between the development, climate, peace, and humanitarian communities, as well as the public and private sectors, from the global to the local level.

The Charter emphasizes the need for coherent and coordinated finance across climate change adaptation, development, and disaster risk management, aiming to overcome silos and fragmentation. It highlights the importance of linking various forms of finance to enhance preparedness, response, recovery, and reconstruction efforts. At the same time, the Charter calls for substantial increases in the arrangement of finance in advance of disasters to ensure faster, more reliable, and better-targeted support.

This is all underpinned by a focus on the importance of early action to protect people from predictable hazards. The Charter rejects the inevitability of disasters and calls on actors to come together to ensure that warnings turn into action ahead of climate impacts.

The Charter calls for a comprehensive and coordinated effort to achieve these goals – not in isolation but in support of existing frameworks and initiatives that seek to address specific issues related to climate adaptation, long term resilience building and humanitarian needs.

Throughout the process of co-developing this Charter, there was a strong call to be explicit about both the linkages between it and other internationally agreed frameworks, as well clarity as to how the Charter not only complements them but builds on them – creating something that offers a focus on activities necessary for their success, sustainability and coherence with each other.

This Companion Piece focuses predominantly on internationally agreed frameworks and initiatives that States are party to, though it is recognized that these are not the only frameworks, initiatives and collaborative processes that the principles of the Charter are linked to and support.