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Disaster Risk Reduction, Resilience

Toolkit Intro Why Key Asks Other Sectors

Intro

Integrating nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive actions into disaster risk reduction (DRR), emergency and resilience programming will support the prevention of malnutrition and facilitate early recover from disaster.

Helping communities cope with the devastating impact of disasters through a nutrition-sensitive preparedness and response is a worthwhile investment that will pay off in terms of short-term health outcomes and longer-term human capital contributions to productivity, economic growth, and sustainable development.

Why

Why the sector needs to get involved

  • Nutrition and resilience are deeply connected: nutrition both fuels and results from enhanced resilience. Tackling malnutrition is key for boosting resilience as individuals who are well-nourished tend to be healthier, more energetic, and have a better physical reserve; thus, households secure in nutrition are better equipped to handle external challenges. On the flip side, households most impacted by such challenges often face a heightened risk of malnutrition.
  • Programmes emphasizing resilience that bolster food, social protection, health, and WASH systems are vital in addressing the core causes of malnutrition. Consequently, they play a central role in preventing malnutrition and maintaining nutritional advancements.
  • A more comprehensive risk assessment benefiting from reliable data from the nutrition stakeholders would help implement DRR programmes in countries most exposed to disasters.
  • Integrating nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive actions in DRR preparedness and response enhances levels of individual and community resilience and facilitates an early recovery.

Key asks

  • Integrate nutrition and food indicators into early warning systems (measuring caseload of undernutrition cases, rise in prices).
  • Integrate nutrition in resilience programming, including in situation analysis, targeting, definition of objectives and activities, and M&E.
  • Implement FAO’s Disaster Risk Reduction for Food and Nutrition Security Framework Programme.
  • Build the resilience of communities through strengthening rural livelihoods, agriculture and food systems, as well as education and other related sectors, in order to be prepared to cope with hazards, thus reducing their impact and facilitating an early recovery.
  • Prioritise investment in pandemic preparedness. The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted the delivery and scale-up of nutrition interventions, strained food systems and health care, and devastated livelihoods and economies.
  • Place nutrition at the forefront of tackling the climate crisis and implement climate mitigation and adaptation strategies to address the impact of climate on food systems and nutrition. Improved nutrition means healthier and more resilient populations that need less from energy-intensive food and health systems.