The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, aims to significantly reduce disaster-related losses and risks globally. A central aspect of this agreement is the recognition of science as a fundamental element for understanding, assessing, and mitigating disaster risk.
In June 2025, the global disaster risk reduction community convened in Geneva, Switzerland, to evaluate progress, identify challenges, and propose strategies for accelerating the framework's implementation. This article reflects on that gathering, expresses concerns about a potential weakening of the science–policy interface supporting the Framework's goals, and identifies actions to ensure the scientific community's full involvement in informing future work.
Disasters present complex and interdisciplinary challenges requiring contributions from various actors. While nation states hold primary responsibility for risk reduction, the Sendai Framework promotes a multi-stakeholder approach, explicitly including the science and technology community. This community encompasses diverse disciplines, sectors, and countries, contributing to risk understanding and the design of effective reduction mechanisms.
A robust science–policy interface is essential for natural hazard scientists' work to be useful and utilized in risk reduction efforts. Such interfaces exist at multiple scales and are defined as social processes facilitating exchanges and joint knowledge construction between scientists and other policy actors to enhance decision-making. The objective of these interfaces is to ensure decisions are informed by the best available evidence.
Effective science–policy interfaces typically require transparent scientific networks, genuine interdisciplinary interactions between social and natural sciences, and scientists fulfilling their responsibilities as knowledge holders and technology developers.
These interfaces can operate through both bottom-up (e.g., local scientists informing national agencies) and top-down (e.g., UN calls for evidence) approaches, which mutually reinforce each other. An imbalance, such as a lack of scientific engagement at the intergovernmental level, may lead to UN agendas that do not adequately represent scientific priorities.
This communication specifically analyzes the 2025 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction to examine how it reflects on the science–policy interface, aiming to prompt the broader scientific community to address a perceived diminishing influence of science within this process.