Attachments
Executive Summary
The Nepal Disaster Report (NDR) 2024 attempts to comprehensively map disaster events, activities, and programmes carried out by the government, non-governmental agencies, and other humanitarian partners between 17 July 2018 to 16 July 2024. This report presents a brief background on various disaster hazards along with their impact. It briefly highlights loss and damage, impacts and trends due to these disasters.
Analysis of these recorded disaster incidents shows an increasing trend in recent years. An alarming 32,375 small and large-scale disaster incidents were reported from 2018 until 2024. In reviewing the past six years' disaster trends, fire, landslide, thunderbolt, and earthquake have topped the list as the most common and are on the rise. These disaster incidents claimed the lives of 3672 people, while 446 went missing, and an additional 11,752 were injured. In all, 57,271 houses in the disaster affected areas were affected whereas 43, 168 infrastructures were destroyed. Additional losses of 18,336 livestock were also recorded due to disasters.
The total value of economic losses incurred from disasters during the five-year reporting period accounted for NPR 23.60 billion. Recurrent disasters like fire, earthquakes, landslides, thunderbolt, flood, heavy rainfall, and windstorms were recorded. Landslides (2881) and fires (19,534) were leading disasters in terms of number of occurrences, similarly landslides (878), fire (619), thunderbolt (477), drowning (346), flood (260) and animal incidents (246) claimed more lives, comparatively.
A hazard comparison of demographic and economic loss shows that the highest number of deaths (losses) and injuries have occurred from landslides, fires, thunderbolts, and floods combined. The most economic loss is reported from fires, with earthquakes, flooding and landslides ranking second, third and fourth respectively.
Nepal's current disaster governance landscape is guided by the Constitution and the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (DRRM) Act (2074). The Constitution stipulates that DRRM is the sole authority of local government and is also a shared authority among federal, provincial, and local governments. DRRM governance has been crafted to align with the changed governance structure. The country implemented the National Policy for DRR (2018), which is supported by the National Strategic Action Plan for DRR (2018-2030) in line with the Sendai Framework for DRR. Provincial and local governments have developed essential legal instruments and established institutional set up to enable them to implement DRRM.
The DRRM Act (2017) and Local Government Operation Act (2017) established institutional structures and provided them with mandates to deliver in the spirit of the Constitution at various levels. Federal government agencies, such as the Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration (MoFAGA) and National Planning Commission (NPC), have been supporting local governments by providing guidelines and sample policy documents to enhance local DRRM. Documents, such as local DRR Strategic Action Plan Guidelines (2021) and Guidelines for Local Level Planning (2021) guide plans and actions initiated by local governments.
This report examines how the government responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, how it responded to the crisis, socio-economic impact, impact on livelihoods caused by the pandemic, coordination, planning and monitoring, gender dimension of the disaster, and key learnings. It presents the government’s support in strengthening national, provincial, and local governance structures, which enable vulnerable communities to be better prepared, protected, and have sustainable recovery and increased resilience to crises, disaster management, and the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The NDR 2024 also sheds light on Nepal’s progress made in earthquake reconstruction and recovery activities and pathways to reconstruction gains. It also reflects on how the country dealt with the forces of dual disasters (i.e., health and natural disasters) and showcases existing institutional arrangements and mechanisms for disaster preparedness, relief, and emergency response. It covers the existing legal and policy frameworks for DRRM and further elucidates the existing institutional capacities at the federal, provincial, and local levels for effective DRR and emergency management.
Finally, the report puts forth some challenges and the way forward based on lessons from disaster impacts and DRRM initiatives during this period among all three tiers of government and stakeholders. Nepal’s priority actions on DRR are identified as the guidance towards localization of DRR policies and activities contributing towards building a more resilient country
This report examines how the government responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, how it responded to the crisis, socio-economic impact, impact on livelihoods caused by the pandemic, coordination, planning and monitoring,