15/06/2026
When ecosystems are damaged by a disaster, the losses rarely appear in any official record.
Crops lost to a cyclone may be counted. But the wetland that buffered the storm surge, the forest that slowed the flood, the reef that absorbed the wave energy – these losses are harder to measure, and harder still to find in national data systems.
A new framework from United Nations University - EHS, UN Environment Programme, Asia Pacific Adaptation Network (APAN) and UNDRR is there to change that. It introduces a standardised approach to identifying, monitoring, and assessing losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services linked to climate change and disaster events – across both sudden-onset events like storms and slow-onset processes like ocean acidification.
The framework works across three dimensions:
🌿 Ecosystem extent – how much has been lost or degraded
📊 Ecosystem condition – including biodiversity change
💡 Diverse values of nature – from carbon storage to cultural identity to community health
Monitoring across all three, before and after hazardous events, builds the evidence base that planning, finance, and policy decisions currently lack.
Without this data, countries struggle to access finance for ecosystem-related loss and damage, report transparently under the Paris Agreement, or integrate environmental losses into Sendai Framework monitoring.
The DELTA Resilience system is a complementary tracking tool for structured integration of environmental losses – a significant step toward more complete disaster accounting.
Access the Framework ➡️ https://ow.ly/CFTZ50Z8VhL