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Disaster risks, migration, and forced displacement: Understanding the link between disaster risk, migration and forced displacement in Colombia

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Summary

In recent years, hazards exacerbated by climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic underpinned the urgent need for effective disaster risk reduc-tion (DRR). In response, governments worldwide seek to align DRR strategies with efforts towards poverty reduction, sustainable development, and climate change mitigation. Especially in fragile contexts, hazards and disasters collide with exist-ing vulnerabilities, conflicts, displacement and mi-gration dynamics. Risks worldwide are becoming more and more complex requiring a systemic DRR approach to comprehend the interplay of haz-ards, vulnerability, exposure and capacity across sectors, communities, and regions.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduc-tion (SFDRR) aims at understanding, reducing, and managing risks worldwide (UNDRR, 2015). In the context of minimizing climate-related disasters and displacement, the SFDRR recognizes migrants and displaced persons as key stakeholders in DRR and disaster risk management (DRM) processes.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) simi-larly identify the management of causes of dis-placement as crucial and therefore prioritize strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards. In line with these global frameworks, understanding the systemic nature of risks has become an urgent necessity to de-velop more holistic approaches to risk manage-ment that account for the interconnectivity of systems. To this end, integrated risk governance as an inherent component of risk-informed de-velopment (RID) allows for the improvement of prioritization processes in decision-making.

In recent years, Colombia has experienced signifi-cant changes in migration dynamics (DANE, 2021).
As a result of the social, economic, and political crisis in Venezuela, more than 2.4 million mi-grants and displaced people arrived in Colombia since 2015. This migration and forced displace-ment due to the armed conflict with FARC has created challenges for the community in Bogotá:
The lack of planned urbanization in combination with other complex social dynamics creates infor-mal settlements, in which people often are partic-ularly vulnerable and exposed to disaster risks due to poor infrastructure or the prevalence of natural hazards.

Prepared within the framework of the Global Ini-tiative for Disaster Risk Management (GIDRM), the objective of this report is to provide an over-view of the dynamics of prevailing risk conditions in informal settlements, migratory dynamics of the Venezuelan population, and disaster risk management in the district of Usme in Bogotá in reference to the findings of the Multipurpose In-dex 2021 (MPI2021). By examining the link be-tween disaster risk conditions in the host commu-nities and the vulnerability of migrants, the re-port aims to highlight the potential of reducing risks by incorporating risk-informed development approaches.