Fiji faces annual disaster losses of US$79M, UN calls for urgent action

Fiji alone faces an average annual loss of US$79 million, or 2.6 percent of its GDP, due to disasters.

This has been highlighted by United Nations Resident Coordinator for the Pacific Dirk Wagener, as he calls for urgent action on disaster risk financing.

Speaking during the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction (IDDRR) commemoration today in Suva, Wagener warned that across the Pacific, chronic underinvestment in resilience is threatening to erase decades of development progress.

He says a single severe natural hazard could cause damages in Fiji of up to US$845 million, equivalent to 28 percent of the country’s GDP.

Wagener says these shocks do not just set countries back, they erase years, sometimes decades, of development progress, and yet, “we are still dramatically under-investing in prevention.”

He says that Pacific Island Countries are losing over US$1.1 billion annually to disasters, highlighting the devastating impact of events like Tropical Cyclone Winston, which alone cost Fiji 31 percent of its GDP in one night.

He also pointed out that most Pacific governments allocate less than one percent of their national budgets to disaster risk reduction (DRR), while international support is also insufficient—with only two percent of global development assistance projects in recent years having DRR as an explicit objective.

Wagener says that resilience finance must operate at every level, from national treasuries to local communities and the private sector.

He also called for every Pacific Island Country to adopt a National Disaster Risk Financing Strategy that goes beyond traditional insurance models and instead provides financial tools that incentivize risk reduction and prevention.

He says Fiji must step up and ensure resilience is financed at the scale required to secure a safer, more sustainable future for all.