Generating multiple disaster resilience dividends: Narrative, evidence, and tools
Investing in disaster-risk resilience brings ample direct benefits but for decision-makers, making the case for investments in disaster risk reduction can be challenging. The multiple resilience dividends narrative supports a broader business case for DRR investment. Investing in resilience can generate a wide range of benefits: protecting lives, loss reduction, and wider development, social, and environmental co-benefits. Highlighting the multiple benefits of resilience can increase buy-in, acceptability, and overall support for resilience-enhancing measures. Decision-support tools are useful for identifying and communicating these multiple dividends. Making the case now is important in the context of climate change, which is increasing risks, and at a time of massive global investment in infrastructure that needs to be made disaster-proof and climate-smart.
This policy brief provides the following recommendations:
- Jointly communicating the benefits of reducing disaster and the co-benefits of integrating the management of disaster and climate risks with development addresses the multiple priorities of decision-makers and motivates investment in building disaster resilience and climate-smart development.
- Using the triple resilience dividend approach systematically assesses the benefits of reducing disaster losses (first dividend), unlocking development potential (second dividend), and fostering wider social and environmental co-benefits (third dividend).
- Existing and novel decision-support tools can be employed for generating resilience dividends. Proper care should be taken assessing hard and, particularly, softer resilience-type interventions, such as ecosystem-based measures.
- National-level resilience-dividend assessments can build on the precedent set by some donors and NGOs that have started to embrace the resilience dividends narrative.
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