The United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP’s) approach to risk-informed development (RID) is a corporate effort aligned with the UNDP Strategic Plan 2022-2025 to articulate how UNDP embraces risk-informed development as one of the accelerators of sustainable development that will ensure that those who are left behind participate in and benefit from development progress and achieve human security. It gives directions for forging internal and external partnerships for risk-proofing the future of development and for driving new resource mobilization opportunities for this line of work for UNDP. The approach articulates how UNDP’s Global Policy Network (GPN) can support UNDP Country Offices and programme countries through existing and innovative services and tools, while sketching out new ways to pioneer the approach.
The paper presents the rationale for RID, an approach that originated in the field of disaster risk reduction and that has expanded in recent years to embrace climate change-related risks and the integration of an even broader spectrum linked to health, conflict, environment, economic shocks, human rights and their related risk drivers. The COVID-19 pandemic, a disaster in essence, is a stark reminder of the systemic and interconnected nature of risk. The paper, therefore, offers reflections and an approach on how to evolve the risk-informed paradigm with UNDP to address systemic and multidimensional risks in support of UNDP Country Offices and the countries they serve.