A guide for public-sector resilience bond sponsorship

This paper offers a path forward for governments at all levels—cities, states, federal agencies, and international aid programs—to align public-sector disaster risk reduction measures with private insurance using Resilience Bonds. This new bond mechanism was developed to (1) expand financial protections—in the form of catastrophe insurance coverage—for vulnerable communities and (2) leverage new project finance for resilient infrastructure projects that measurably reduce risk. The aim of this work is to help improve the speed, availability, and cost effectiveness of both proactive resilience project finance and reactive disaster recovery funding.