A human-centered summary of GAR2025’s most eye-opening findings on hidden losses, recurring disasters, climate risk, insurability, and why resilience investment pays.
When we think about disasters, most of us picture catastrophic earthquakes, massive hurricanes, or dramatic floods filling global headlines. These events feel extreme, exceptional, and somehow distant from everyday life.
The United Nations’ Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2025 (GAR2025) tells a very different story. Disaster risk is not rare or remote. It is constant, often invisible, and far more expensive than we usually realise. Quietly, it is shaping economies, livelihoods, and the future of entire generations.
Published by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), GAR2025 does more than challenge familiar assumptions. It shows that we are standing at a turning point. The decisions taken today will determine whether societies continue to absorb growing losses or choose to invest in resilience and long-term stability.
Five Key Findings
Based on UNDRR’s GAR2025The True Cost of Disasters Is More Than Ten Times Higher Than Reported
Disaster losses are usually measured by counting damaged buildings and destroyed infrastructure. According to GAR2025, these direct losses averaged USD 180 to 200 billion per year between 2001 and 2020.
That figure, however, tells only part of the story.
When broader impacts on ecosystems, livelihoods, and social systems are taken into account, what the report refers to as “missing losses”, the true annual cost rises to more than USD 2.3 trillion. This is over ten times higher than official estimates.
The difference comes from factors that rarely appear in damage statistics. Disrupted supply chains, lost years of education, declining health, reduced productivity, and degraded ecosystems all leave lasting economic scars. Tourism collapses, fisheries decline, and families struggle to recover long after the physical damage is repaired.
Small, Recurrent Disasters Cause the Greatest Economic Losses
Large disasters dominate news coverage. Earthquakes, cyclones, and major floods are what most people associate with disaster risk. GAR2025 shows that these headline events are not the main drivers of economic loss.
Instead, the greatest damage comes from small but frequent disasters, such as local floods, landslides, droughts, and storms that occur again and again. These are known as extensive risks, and they quietly drain economies over time.
Colombia offers a clear example. Between 2000 and 2023, the country’s most costly disaster category involved events affecting fewer than 330 people at a time. Individually, they seemed minor. Taken together, they caused more than USD 1 billion in losses, exceeding the impact of much larger, widely reported disasters.
A “Once-in-a-Century” Flood Is Now a Lifetime Certainty
Disaster risk is no longer an abstract future concern. It has become a generational reality.
GAR2025 highlights a striking shift. A person born in 1990 has about a 63 percent chance of experiencing a so-called “once-in-a-hundred-years” flood during their lifetime. For a child born in 2025, that probability rises to 86 percent.
Events once described as exceptional are now becoming statistically likely within a single lifetime. Climate change is not something that will affect only future generations. It is already shaping the lives of children born today.
“The trend is not destiny.”
Risk can be reduced, but only if societies act deliberately and early.
Disaster Risk Is Pushing the World Toward an Uninsurable Future
As risks grow, the systems designed to absorb shocks are starting to break down. GAR2025 warns of a dangerous cycle. Higher risk leads to higher insurance premiums. Rising premiums reduce affordability. Insurers then withdraw from high-risk areas, leaving entire communities without coverage.
This is already happening. In parts of Australia and California, insurance companies have exited high-risk markets, leaving thousands of homeowners exposed.
“What is not insurable is not investable.”
When areas become uninsurable, investment slows, property values fall, and economic opportunities disappear. Over time, this dynamic can contribute to broader financial instability.
Investing in Resilience Delivers a Double Economic Return
Despite these warnings, GAR2025 offers a clear and hopeful conclusion. Resilience pays.
Analysis from the World Bank included in the report distinguishes between asset losses, such as physical damage, and well-being losses, such as reduced income, health, and quality of life. When a flood destroys a farmer’s tractor, the immediate loss is tangible. The longer-term impact, lost harvests, reduced income, and food insecurity, is often far greater.
On average, every dollar lost in assets results in roughly two dollars of well-being losses, particularly for lower-income households. The reverse is also true. Every dollar of damage avoided through disaster risk reduction generates about two dollars in societal benefits.
Conclusion: From Generation Jolt to Generation Regeneration
The UN’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2025 makes one thing clear. Our traditional understanding of disaster risk is incomplete.
Risk is far larger than reported, driven mainly by frequent and overlooked events, increasingly likely across a human lifetime, and capable of destabilising financial systems.
This is not a message of despair. It is a call to act with clarity and purpose. GAR2025 shows that smarter, data-driven, and economically sound solutions already exist.
The real question is no longer whether disasters will happen. It is whether we choose to react after losses occur or invest in resilience before they do.
Generation Jolt
Absorbing shock after shock, paying higher costs each year.
Generation Regeneration
Building resilience early, protecting people, assets, and development gains.
The choice is ours, and the moment to decide is now.
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