SEI INITIATIVE The SEI Initiative on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk

The SEI Initiative on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk (TDDR) addresses the paradox where development often acts as a root cause of disaster risk rather than a means to reduce it. Using a social-ecological systems (SES) framework, the initiative focuses on three research areas: understanding the interaction between development and risk, exploring equitable social-ecological resilience, and investigating adaptive governance processes. The goal is to generate knowledge and a synthesis framework to transform development into a tool for risk reduction, while monitoring the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

• Development is frequently a primary driver of disaster risk globally, often acting as a "root cause of disaster risk, rather than a means to reduce it."
• The initiative identifies three critical gaps in current disaster risk reduction (DRR): a lack of understanding regarding the complexity of vulnerability creation, a failure to apply knowledge at the appropriate scale for fundamental change, and an over-fixation on "reducing" risk instead of analyzing the trade-offs in decision-making.
• The initiative highlights two specific risk patterns: the "pace-mismatch," where risk governance capacities cannot keep up with the increasing exposure caused by economic growth, and the "vulnerability-resilience paradox," where short-term vulnerability to normal hazards is reduced while long-term resilience to extreme events is eroded.
• In the Asia-Pacific region, the number of people exposed to annual flooding more than doubled between 1970 and 2010, increasing from 30 million to 64 million.
• The initiative seeks to develop the concept of "equitable social-ecological resilience," recognizing that resilience-building actions often involve trade-offs where some individuals gain more than others, meaning resilience alone does not guarantee equitable development.
• The initiative aims to investigate adaptive governance to secure the integration of disaster risk and development, noting that while adaptive governance is well-theorized for natural resource management, there has been "little progress" in applying it to the integration of DRR and development.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2015). SEI INITIATIVE The SEI Initiative on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-FS-2015-Transforming-development-disaster-risk-initiative-LR.pdf

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. SEI INITIATIVE The SEI Initiative on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk. 2015. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-FS-2015-Transforming-development-disaster-risk-initiative-LR.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=SEI INITIATIVE The SEI Initiative on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk |date=2015 |url=https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-FS-2015-Transforming-development-disaster-risk-initiative-LR.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2015sei, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{SEI INITIATIVE The SEI Initiative on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2015}, url = {https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-FS-2015-Transforming-development-disaster-risk-initiative-LR.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }