Creating Pathways for Disaster Risk Financing Post-COVID-19

As South Asia faces an increasingly complex and expanding disaster risk landscape, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the systemic gaps in risk management. There is a need for a paradigm shift in disaster risk reduction—from a single-hazard, single-sector perspective to a multi-hazard, multi-sectoral, and systemic risk perspective supported by parallel risk financing measures.

This brief examines the current gaps in the efficient operationalisation of disaster risk financing and outlines three potentially pivotal pathways through which a systemic risk perspective can be incorporated into disaster risk financing. The aim is to build community and economic resilience to future cascading disasters.