The Working Group on developing the strategy of financial protection against natural disasters met in Dushanbe on July 12.
According to the Ministry of Finance (MoF) Secretariat, representatives of relevant ministers and agencies as well as representatives of the National Bank of Tajikistan and the World Bank, which is implementing the project aiming to strengthen resilience to natural disasters, participated in the meeting.
The main objective of the meeting was in discussing the draft strategy of financial protection against natural disaster for 2020-2030 worked out by a MoF as well as discussing with the World Bank further event on implementing this strategy.
According to the National Disaster Risk Reduction Strategy (NDRRS) designed for 2019-2030, the past twenty-two years has seen 3,460 natural disasters in Tajikistan and a total damage caused by them has been estimated at some 500 million U.S. dollars.
Meanwhile, specialists at a Regional Forum on Disaster Risk Financing that took place in the Kazakh city of Almaty on February 26 this year, in particular, noted that the economies of Central Asia must significantly increase financial protection against natural disasters and consolidate efforts to effectively manage disaster risks. Policymakers and disaster risk management analysts from five Central Asian countries reportedly discussed ways to improve financial protection, including which financing instruments to use, in the context of rising challenges brought about by climate change.
Central Asia is among the world's most disaster-prone regions. Earthquakes, floods, landslides, extreme weather events and other natural disasters occur almost every year across the region.
In the past three decades, natural disasters have affected more than 10 million residents of the region and caused economic losses of almost $2.5 billion, according to the World Bank. Earthquakes, which have the potential to cause the most damage, reportedly impact 2% of the region's GDP every year, while floods impact 1.6%.
