Summary record of the first session of the Resilience Council

Chair: Gregorio Yap, Chair, Resilience Council, Tacloban, Philippines

Attendance: Eight members from six countries, including the Chair. The attendance figure records unique participants across the two sittings.

Session format: Open Table, Asia-Pacific sitting, 06:00 UTC; Europe/Africa/Americas sitting, 16:00 UTC.

Agenda

1. Opening of the first Resilience Council session and confirmation of its purpose.
2. Consideration of agenda item RS-001 and the call for evidence, RC/RS/2026/1.
3. Discussion of evidence collection, report handling and the five-part pattern test.
4. Identification of initial work priorities and assignments.
5. Scheduling of the next session.

Summary of proceedings

1. The Chair opened the session in two sittings held on the same date, one at 06:00 UTC and one at 16:00 UTC. The record consolidates the proceedings. Eight members from six countries participated across the sittings. The Chair recalled that the Council’s initial work concerned resilience practices affecting small businesses and that its current agenda item was RS-001, as set out in the call for evidence issued on 10 February 2026.

2. The Chair stated that this was an organizing and evidence-gathering session. The Council had not received a formal report under RS-001 as of the session date. Members were therefore not being asked to determine whether a reported practice met a pattern threshold or to endorse a proposed remedy. The Chair emphasized that the minutes should distinguish between preliminary discussion, submitted evidence and later findings.

3. The Chair introduced the Council’s working process: reports would be collected and reviewed against Volume, Frequency, Consistency, Spread and Corroboration; a draft fix could be prepared only after the pattern review; the draft would then be opened to public consultation before any Assembly ballot. If adopted, a standard could be sent to the relevant decision-makers. The Chair stressed that the sequence was intended to prevent an isolated account or an untested proposal from being represented as a Council finding.

4. For the Asia-Pacific sitting, Maribel Santos of Tacloban, Philippines, supported beginning with a short, accessible reporting route. She proposed that members be able to describe a disruption, the effect on the business, and the steps taken to resume operations, without needing specialist terminology. She also recommended that the Council make clear that a report could be submitted without identifying the member’s business. Her remarks were recorded as process suggestions, not as a report of a particular incident.

5. Kenji Mori of Sendai, Japan, asked that the evidence form separate the date and location of an event from the date on which a business regained ordinary operations. He considered those distinctions important for assessing how long disruption continued. He further suggested recording whether the account related to insurance, access to temporary finance, continuity planning or another aspect of recovery, while leaving room for members to identify issues not anticipated in the form.

6. Yuki Tanaka of Kumamoto, Japan, proposed that the Council invite supporting materials where they were available but not make documentation a condition of submitting an initial account. She observed that members may not retain the same records or have equal access to assistance when a disruption is under way. The Chair noted that supporting material could assist corroboration, but that the Council would need to assess the reliability and relevance of each item rather than treating the presence or absence of a document as conclusive.

7. Asha Kulkarni of Pune, India, recommended that the reporting guidance distinguish between a business’s own experience and information it had heard from others. In her view, this would help reviewers assess the source and scope of each account without discouraging members from flagging a practice they believed warranted investigation. She also asked that the form permit a member to indicate uncertainty, including uncertainty about dates, amounts or the number of businesses affected.

8. Wanjiku Njoroge of Kisumu, Kenya, urged the Council to avoid assuming that every business had a written continuity plan or access to formal recovery support. She recommended recording what support was available, what was sought and whether any support was received, while avoiding language that might imply blame when a business had not prepared a formal plan. Her contribution was treated as guidance on inclusive evidence collection, not as a finding about any provider or institution.

9. Daniel Brooks of New Orleans, United States, proposed that reports distinguish the immediate event from the subsequent recovery process. He suggested fields for the nature of the disruption, interruption to operations, access to funds and the point at which ordinary activity resumed. He also recommended that the Council avoid collecting unnecessary personal or commercially sensitive information and explain how identifying details would be handled before inviting wider participation.

10. Eleri Morgan of Cardiff, United Kingdom, asked that any later assessment consider whether apparently similar accounts arose in different locations and under different circumstances. She supported recording dates and broad categories consistently so that the Council could examine recurrence and spread without treating every event as identical. She also recommended that consultation materials, if developed at a later stage, explain which parts of the evidence remained uncertain and what additional information was being sought.

11. The Chair summarized the contributions as proposals for the design of evidence collection. He noted that they addressed accessibility, source attribution, corroborating material, the separation of event and recovery dates, and protection of confidential information. No member proposed that these suggestions be treated as adopted policy. The Chair asked that the initial form remain a working instrument and that changes be recorded transparently as evidence-gathering proceeds.

12. In reviewing the Council’s available reporting position, the Chair recorded that the Resilience Council had eight members from six countries and zero reports from zero countries. The available report profile therefore contained no report-derived countries, situations or team-size information; the median amount at stake was approximately US$0, and there had been zero reports in the preceding 30 days. Members agreed that these figures described the reporting position at that time and should not be interpreted as evidence that resilience problems were absent.

13. The Chair referred to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s published account that small and medium-sized enterprises bear approximately 75 per cent of business disaster losses, and that disaster risk reduction can reduce losses by up to one third.¹ Members noted that this wider context supported the relevance of the agenda but could not substitute for evidence about the practices under examination. The Council would need to establish its own findings from reports and corroboration before drawing conclusions about the scope or causes of any recurring problem.

14. The members discussed the five-part pattern test in preliminary terms. Volume would concern the number and scale of reports; Frequency, recurrence over time; Consistency, whether accounts described materially similar practices; Spread, the range of places or contexts represented; and Corroboration, the support available from documents or other reliable sources. These descriptions were offered as an orientation for future evidence review, not as a detailed interpretation or a determination that RS-001 had met any part of the test.

15. Members agreed that individual accounts should not be combined into an asserted pattern merely because they concerned a common subject such as disaster recovery. Reviewers would need to retain relevant distinctions among types of disruption, support sought, decisions made and consequences described. Where accounts differed, the record should preserve those differences rather than forcing them into a single narrative. The Chair noted that this approach would also help identify gaps where further evidence was needed.

16. The Council considered the possible scope of RS-001, including the timeliness of insurance decisions, access to bridge funding after a declared disaster and continuity-planning support for micro businesses. Members treated these as questions posed by the agenda item, not as settled obligations or conclusions. No deadline, eligibility rule, financial threshold or definition of a declared disaster was adopted at this session. Any proposal on those matters would require evidence, drafting and consultation in accordance with the Assembly’s process.

17. Members also discussed the importance of recording the status of evidence without overstating it. A submitted account would be identifiable as a report; a corroborating item would be described separately; and a summary of recurring features would be prepared only when the review supported it. The Chair undertook to ensure that subsequent Council materials stated whether a point was a member proposal, an evidence-based observation, a draft recommendation or an adopted decision.

18. On the question of public participation, the Council agreed to invite evidence in a way that did not require members to disclose their businesses publicly. The Chair noted that the Council’s work should describe practices rather than name individual businesses. The session did not authorize publication of any member’s identity or any account, and no business names were recorded in this summary.

19. The Chair concluded that the session had established an initial work plan only. The Council had not completed the pattern test, had not found that any practice passed or failed the test, and had not prepared or adopted a draft standard. The current status remained evidence gathering under the call for evidence RC/RS/2026/1.

Decisions

1. The Council confirmed RS-001 as its evidence-gathering agenda item, consistent with the call for evidence RC/RS/2026/1.

2. The Council agreed that initial evidence guidance should invite accounts of disruption and recovery, allow members to identify uncertainty, distinguish first-hand accounts from information reported by others, and accept supporting material where available without making it a prerequisite for an initial submission.

3. The Council agreed that reports and any supporting material should be handled separately in review, with attention to confidentiality and the minimum information required. The agreed approach is procedural and does not constitute a finding about any organization or practice.

4. The Council confirmed that the five-part pattern test would be applied only after evidence had been received and reviewed. No pattern-test result or substantive remedy was adopted.

5. The Council scheduled its next session for 20 March 2026. The Chair will confirm the sitting arrangements to members through the usual notice process.

Action items

Closing

The Chair closed the session after confirming the actions and next meeting date. The record reflects the Council’s work as of 20 February 2026 and does not anticipate later evidence, decisions or Assembly action.

Source

1. ¹ United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, information on disaster risk reduction and resilience practices for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Notes and sources

Sources

1. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction — Supporting disaster risk reduction and resilience practices for small and medium-sized enterprises