• The accelerating climate crisis is reshaping disaster risks. Conventional hazards are intensifying, new hazards are emerging, and impacts are spreading. The impacts now spill over into energy and industrial systems, revealing clear limits in the current response framework.

• Rising disaster losses in Korea underscores these limits. The system still depends on past patterns, making it unable to manage concurrent hazards. Proactive risk management has become essential rather than optional.

• Disaster management standards must now be redefined to reflect the non-stationary, uncertain, and rapidly escalating nature of climate risks.

• First, prevention investment needs to increase. Prevention is highly cost-effective, yet in Korea’s most recent national climate adaptation plan, it accounts for only 5.8 percent of total planned spending and should be treated as a strategic investment in economic resilience, not a discretionary cost.

• Second, climate risk should be managed as a trigger-based risk management — a climate risk decision-making framework that quantifies hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, and links these metrics directly to budgets, project reviews, and building and infrastructure design standards.

• Third, the concepts of “disaster” and “damage” require revision. Disasters should be framed as a function of a changing climate, and damage assessment should cover indirect and cascading social and economic losses rather than only direct physical losses.

• Shifting Korea from passive, ex post response to a survival-oriented climate strategy will require three changes: ① stronger prevention investment, ② a trigger-based risk management, and ③ updated concepts of disaster and damage.

• The forthcoming 「Fourth National Climate Crisis Response Plan (2026–2030)」 should initiate this transition.