Summary record of the ninth session of the Resilience Council

Agenda

1. Opening of the session and adoption of the agenda.
2. Review of RS-001, the proposed Reopen Standard, and the five-part pattern test.
3. Evidence on disaster losses, insurance decisions, bridge funding and reopening.
4. Review of member reporting, the Reopen Map and readiness work.
5. Decisions, assignments and date of the next session.

1. Gregorio Yap opened the ninth session in the Asia-Pacific sitting and welcomed members joining both Open Table sittings. He recalled that the Council’s work concerned practices affecting small businesses across different settings, not the conduct of any one named company. The Chair stated that the purpose of this session was to establish what the evidence could support at this stage, identify what remained unverified, and agree on practical follow-up. He noted that members should distinguish reported experience from corroborated findings.

2. The Chair introduced the agenda. Members accepted it without amendment. The session record was to cover the two scheduled sittings, at 06:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC, and to summarize interventions without identifying members’ businesses. The Chair confirmed that no ballot on RS-001 was before the Council. The item remained at the pattern-review stage, with corroboration still outstanding; accordingly, the Council was not being asked to approve final language or to send a standard to the Assembly.

3. For context, the Chair referred to the interim pattern review, RC/RS/2026/N.1, dated 15 September 2026. He reported that the Council had received 366 resilience reports from 49 countries as of 22 October, from 153 members in 47 countries. The median amount at stake in the reports was approximately US$3,900. The Chair emphasized that these figures described submissions to Reseated and were not a global estimate of disaster losses or insurance performance.

4. Members reviewed the five-part pattern test: Volume, Frequency, Consistency, Spread and Corroboration. The Council had found sufficient indications to continue its review under four parts, while the Corroboration part remained pending. Members agreed that the number and distribution of reports justified further examination, but that volume alone did not establish a shared cause or demonstrate that a proposed remedy would work across jurisdictions. The Chair asked speakers to identify evidence gaps, rather than treat an individual account as proof of a general rule.

5. Marites Villanueva of Tacloban, Philippines, described the practical sequence that members had asked the Council to examine: interruption of trading, uncertainty about the timing of an insurance decision, and difficulty meeting immediate costs while waiting for a premises or equipment to become usable. She said that a written reopening plan could help owners organize tasks, but could not replace accessible funding. She urged the Council to keep the proposed three elements—claim decisions within 30 days, bridge funding within 10 days of a declared disaster, and continuity-planning support for micro businesses—visible as questions for testing, not settled obligations.

6. Kenji Sato of Sendai, Japan, asked that the evidence distinguish businesses that had prepared continuity plans from those that had not, while avoiding the assumption that preparation alone determines recovery. He referred to a survey summarized in the UNDRR report in which 8 per cent of prepared small and medium-sized enterprises had not recovered sales, compared with 19 per cent of unprepared enterprises.² He considered the comparison useful context, but said it did not by itself establish what support should be required of insurers or public agencies, nor whether the same result would apply in every type of disaster.

7. Lucía Martín of Valencia, Spain, said that reports about reopening should record the interval between the event, the first claim contact, the decision and the return to trading, where that information was available. She recommended that submissions also note whether an owner had access to temporary premises, replacement equipment or other sources of working capital. She cautioned that “reopened” could mean different things in different accounts: a business might resume limited activity without recovering normal capacity. The Chair agreed that any future evidence template should preserve that distinction.

8. Daniel Brooks of Halifax, Canada, asked members to document the basis for an insurance delay when they could do so safely and lawfully. He said that a timeline supported by dated correspondence or a decision notice would be more useful for corroboration than a general recollection that a claim had taken too long. He also noted that a claim could be complex for reasons unrelated to an insurer’s process. The Council agreed that evidence collection should not ask members to disclose confidential material in an open forum; redacted or summarized records could be offered through the Secretariat’s protected channel.

9. Aisha Rahman of Birmingham, United Kingdom, supported retaining a 30-day decision period as the question under examination, while asking the Council to define what “decision” would mean before drafting any language. She distinguished a decision on liability from payment of an agreed amount and from resolution of a disputed claim. She said that measuring only the date of a final payment might conceal whether a business received timely information. The Chair recorded the distinction for later analysis and stressed that no definition or deadline had been adopted by the Council.

10. Jorge Mendoza of Guadalajara, Mexico, spoke about bridge funding. He said that the interval between a declared disaster and the point at which an owner could use funds was material, and asked that future evidence identify whether assistance was a grant, a loan, an insurance advance or another form of support. He cautioned that a nominally quick offer might not amount to usable bridge funding if eligibility conditions or repayment terms made it unsuitable for a micro business. Members agreed to record the form and accessibility of funding as evidence questions, without treating all public or private support as equivalent.

11. Priya Nair of Kochi, India, urged the Council to include continuity planning that could be used by an owner with little time and few administrative resources. She proposed that members record whether guidance addressed immediate safety, essential records, supplier contact, communications with customers and steps for resuming operations. She did not propose that every business should be required to produce a formal plan. The Chair noted that the RS-001 request concerned continuity-planning support for micro businesses and that the Council should test what support is practical before considering any standard language.

12. Elena Cruz of Cebu City, Philippines, reported on the Reopen Map and the related typhoon and flood readiness drive. She said that the map could help members compare reported reopening experiences, provided that entries were presented as member reports and not as verified claims about a particular locality. She asked that the map distinguish the date of an event from the date of a report and avoid publishing details that could identify a member or their business. The Chair confirmed that anonymity remained the default unless a member chose a public seat.

13. Members considered the geographic spread of reports. The largest country totals in the Council’s 22 October data were the United States, 64; Canada, 24; the Philippines, 23; Spain, 22; the United Kingdom, 17; Japan, 16; Mexico, 14; and India, 14. Members observed that the spread supported continued cross-country review, but did not remove the need to compare the circumstances behind the reports. The Chair asked that future summaries retain country-level context without implying that the reports represented every business or every disaster in a country.

14. On the composition of reporting businesses, the Chair summarized the available team-size categories: 37 per cent of reports came from businesses described as “just me,” 44 per cent from teams of 2–9, 16 per cent from teams of 10–49, and 3 per cent from teams of 50–249. Members said that the proposed focus on micro businesses should not erase the experiences of small employers who also face interruption and reopening costs. They asked that any later analysis identify the team-size range where the information was supplied, while avoiding unsupported conclusions about the needs of an entire category.

15. Members reviewed the external context cited in the Council’s evidence materials. The UNDRR material states that small and medium-sized enterprises bear approximately 75 per cent of business disaster losses and that disaster-risk-reduction measures can reduce losses by up to one third.¹ The Chair said that these findings reinforced the importance of resilience work but did not determine the terms of RS-001. Members also noted the relevance of business continuity under the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, including paragraphs 30(o) and 36(c), with particular attention to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.

16. In the Europe/Africa/Americas sitting, Fatima El Idrissi of Casablanca, Morocco, asked the Council to consider whether members’ reopening experiences were affected by access to public information and local recovery services. She recommended recording whether the owner knew where to seek assistance, without asking members to assess the quality of a public authority’s response. The Chair said that this could help explain differences in reported outcomes, but the Council’s present evidence exercise was not an evaluation of any named authority. The intervention was recorded as a contextual factor for the next pattern review.

17. Thomas Reed of Portland, United States, urged the Council to keep its proposed timeframes measurable. In his view, a future draft could not rely on expressions such as “promptly” if the evidence ultimately supported a specific period. He also asked whether the 10-day bridge-funding question would run from a formal disaster declaration or from an individual business’s loss. Members agreed that the trigger point required explicit analysis. The Chair clarified that the current RS-001 request refers to 10 days from a declared disaster, but that the Council had not adopted a definition of declaration or decided which institutions could meet the request.

18. Members considered how corroboration could be strengthened without placing disproportionate demands on affected owners. They supported seeking, where available, independent confirmation of dates, anonymized documents, multiple accounts from comparable circumstances, and relevant published data. No member was asked to provide a complete insurance file or disclose personal information in the Open Table. The Chair said that corroboration should test the pattern and its limits, not merely accumulate documents. Members agreed that a lack of documentary evidence in an individual report should not automatically invalidate the account, but that it could limit the conclusions drawn from it.

19. The Council reviewed its earlier communications: the continuity checklist issued before the storm, the contribution offered to UNDRR on days-to-reopen data, the letter concerning bridge funding to national disaster agencies in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the open letter to commercial insurers on claim decision times. Members agreed that the record could refer to those documents as Reseated communications, but that no response from any recipient should be implied unless it was documented. The Chair noted that these letters did not complete the pattern test or constitute adoption of RS-001.

20. On the basis of the discussion, the Council made no finding that the Corroboration part of the pattern test had been satisfied. It confirmed that the test remained four of five parts complete, with corroboration pending. Members agreed not to begin drafting a standard at this session and not to refer proposed wording for public consultation or an Assembly ballot. The three requested elements of RS-001 remained the subject of evidence review: insurance claim decisions within 30 days, bridge funding within 10 days of a declared disaster, and continuity-planning support for micro businesses.

21. The Chair confirmed the following follow-up assignments. The Secretariat, through the Resilience Council evidence channel, would continue to receive voluntarily supplied, anonymized timelines and supporting material on claim decisions and reopening. Elena Cruz would provide a short process note on map safeguards and the distinction between a member report and a verified location-level finding. Marites Villanueva and Priya Nair would prepare suggestions for recording continuity-planning support in terms usable by micro businesses. Daniel Brooks and Lucía Martín would propose a concise evidence checklist covering dates, decision stages and reopening status. These assignments were for evidence development only and did not authorize publication of member material without consent.

22. Members asked the Secretariat to retain the existing country and team-size breakdowns in the next review and to flag where information was missing. Kenji Sato would identify which qualifications should accompany the cited comparison between prepared and unprepared enterprises, while Jorge Mendoza would outline the distinctions between types of bridge funding that should be captured in reports. Gregorio Yap would consolidate the material for the Council’s next session and identify which gaps remained relevant to the fifth test. No deadline beyond the next session was set for these tasks.

23. Members agreed that the next Resilience Council Open Table would be held on 19 November 2026, in the usual Asia-Pacific and Europe/Africa/Americas sittings. The Secretariat was asked to circulate the session notice and an evidence-focused agenda. The next meeting would review the assigned material and determine whether corroboration had advanced sufficiently to complete the five-part pattern test. The date and agenda did not constitute a commitment to draft or ballot a standard; any such step would require a further Council decision in accordance with the Assembly’s process.

24. In closing, Gregorio Yap thanked members for keeping their contributions specific and for distinguishing personal experience, corroborating material and wider conclusions. He reiterated that the Council’s task was to develop a reliable account of recurring practice before proposing a fix. The Chair closed the session with the understanding that RS-001 remained under review and that the next report to members would state clearly whether the evidence had changed the Council’s assessment of corroboration.

Decisions and action summary

• The Council confirmed that RS-001 remained at four of five parts of the pattern test, with Corroboration pending.
• No draft standard was authorized, and no consultation or adoption ballot was opened.
• The assigned evidence, map-safeguard and continuity-planning work would be brought to the next session.
• The next session was scheduled for 19 November 2026, with the two regular Open Table sittings.

Sources

1. UNDRR, “Supporting disaster risk reduction and resilience practices for small and medium-sized enterprises.”

2. UNDRR, “Resilience of SMEs” report, including the Japan METI survey comparison cited in the session.

Notes and sources

Sources

1. UNDRR, Supporting disaster risk reduction and resilience practices for small and medium-sized enterprises
2. UNDRR, Resilience of SMEs Report