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Seminar on the Potential of Social Protection to Build Resilience to Disasters

ILO/Japan MAPS project

Recently the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals places social protection and environment protection as the backbone of the new development agenda for the coming 15 years. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) (2015-2030), adopted by UN Member States in 2015, also outlines social protection stands as a crosscutting area to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks. At the ASEAN level, Governments have adopted the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) in 2005, and recently the renewed AADMER Work Programme (2016-2020) highlights the importance of social protection in disaster management as one of its eight priority programmes. Strengthening social protection to better protect people from disasters and mitigate the impacts of climate change is part of the ILO’s Global Flagship Programme Strategy (2016-2020) “Building Social Protection Floors for All”. Furthermore, recognizing the urgency of ensuring decent work, including social protection, in times of disaster, the ILO constituents proposed a revision to the Recommendation “Employment (Transition from War to Peace), 1944 (No. 71) to include natural disasters and catastrophic events as part of the crisis situation.

The proposed ILO-ASEAN seminar provides an opportunity for ASEAN Workers and Employers’ representatives to discuss with Governments the potential of social protection policies in preparing and responding to natural disasters in ASEAN.

More specifically, the seminar aims at:

1. Sharing knowledge, improving understanding and learning from countries' experiences how to use the potential of social protection systems to build resilience to disasters;
2. Adopting policy recommendations to improve management of disaster risks and strengthening resilience through social protection;
3. Exploring possible areas for South-South cooperation across ASEAN Member States in this area;
4. Gathering views from workers and employers’ representatives and engaging their contribution to build effective disaster-responsive social protection systems and floors.

The expected outputs of the seminar include:

1. A background paper compiling relevant practices and recommendations for realizing the potential of social protection measures to build resilience to disasters;
2. An endorsed list of tripartite recommendations and concrete actions for strengthening linkages between social protection and disasters risk management in ASEAN, to be utilized as a reference for the implementation of the ASEAN Declaration on Strengthening Social Protection (2013), the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (2005), and the Sendai Framework Implementation Guide on Social Protection;

Concrete proposals for South-South cooperation projects on social protection and disaster resilience in the region, identifying the role of the ASEAN Secretariat and ILO, in partnership with other UN agencies.