Investing In Disaster Risk Reduction For Resilience

Disaster prevention and the mitigation of climate change effects call for global action. Joint efforts are required among countries, economic sectors, and public and private stakeholders. Not surprisingly, international organizations, such as the United Nations agencies, propose policy frameworks aimed at worldwide influence. The 2015–2030 Sendai Framework seeks to create consensus about the need to act for disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. A key goal is to promote investments in risk reduction and resilience. But how useful is this policy framework? What does it say, and what does it overlook? How can it be implemented among vulnerable communities, in historic sites, and in other sensitive locations affected by disasters? In this book, prominent scholars and practitioners examine the successes and failures of the Sendai Framework. Their case studies show that, despite its good intentions, the Framework achieves very little. The main reason is that, while avoiding a political engagement, it fails to deal with disasters’ root causes and guide the difficult path of effective implementation.The authors bring a fresh look to international policy and design practices, highlighting cross-disciplinary research avenues, and ideas and methods for low-income communities, cities and heritage sites in Portugal, Haiti, the United States, the Philippines, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, among other countries.Global action requires collaboration between heterogeneous stakeholders, but also the recognition of inequalities, power imbalances, and social and environmental injustices. Analyzes outcomes and drawbacks of implementing the third priority of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction Presents real-life attempts to increase risk resilience and climate-change adaptation, both before and after disasters Addresses design as a means to build resilience in community and heritage interventions Calls for embracing the complexities and dynamic character of DRR and climate-change knowledge, investment, and communication

Investing in Resilience: Ensuring a Disaster-Resistant Future focuses on the steps required to ensure that investment in disaster resilience happens and that it occurs as an integral, systematic part of development. At-risk communities in Asia and the Pacific can apply a wide range of policy, capacity, and investment instruments and mechanisms to ensure that disaster risk is properly assessed, disaster risk is reduced, and residual risk is well managed. Yet, real progress in strengthening resilience has been slow to date and natural hazards continue to cause significant loss of life, damage, and disruption in the region, undermining inclusive, sustainable development. Investing in Resilience offers an approach and ideas for reflection on how to achieve disaster resilience. It does not prescribe specific courses of action but rather establishes a vision of a resilient future. It stresses the interconnectedness and complementarity of possible actions to achieve disaster resilience across a wide range of development policies, plans, legislation, sectors, and themes. The vision shows how resilience can be accomplished through the coordinated action of governments and their development partners in the private sector, civil society, and the international community. The vision encourages “investors” to identify and prioritize bundles of actions that collectively can realize that vision of resilience, breaking away from the current tendency to pursue disparate and fragmented disaster risk management measures that frequently trip and fall at unforeseen hurdles. Investing in Resilience aims to move the disaster risk reduction debate beyond rhetoric and to help channel commitments into investment, incentives, funding, and practical action

Successful applications in the field of disaster risk reduction require interdisciplinary, coordinated action. Current literature focuses on comprehensive understandings of processes critical to risk reduction but lack in-depth discussions that put this accumulated knowledge into actionable tools for decision-making. Investing in Disaster Risk Reduction for Resilience is based on the third principle of the Sendai Framework. The UNISDR Sendai Framework for DRR (disaster risk reduction) 2015-2030 is a recently adopted global agreement focused on reducing disaster risk. The Sendai Framework emphasizes that the State holds the primary responsibility in reducing risk but argues for the additional involvement of relevant stakeholders to address challenges in the policy and practice of building resilience strategies. The framework has four key principles: Understanding disaster risk Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response to "Build Back Better" in recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction This book discusses specific aspects of the third principle, including both public and private investment in disaster risk prevention/reduction through structural and non-structural measures. By presenting these multilevel investment strategies, the book offers methods for increasing the resilience of cultural landscapes and heritages for poor, migrating, or displaced populations during post humanitarian crises. This emphasis of increasing resilience of heritage and culture is unique compared to the current literature. Follows the global frameworks for disaster risk reduction and sustainability, specifically the UNISDR Sendai Framework for DRR, 2015-2030 Addresses ways to increase resilience in humanitarian crises after disasters Provides considerations for resilience of cultural landscapes and heritages Presents methodologies dealing with risk uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity

The prevalence of natural disasters in recent years has highlighted the importance of preparing adequately for disasters and dealing efficiently with their consequences. This book addresses how countries can enhance their resilience against natural disasters and move towards economic growth and sustainable development. Covering a wide range of issues, it shows how well thought-out measures can be applied to minimize the impacts of disasters in a variety of situations. Starting with the need for coping with a rapidly changing global environment, the book goes on to demonstrate ways to strengthen awareness of the effectiveness of preventive measures, including in the reconstruction phase. The book also covers the roles played by different actors as well as tools and technologies for improved disaster risk reduction. It focuses on a variety of case studies from across Asia, Africa and Latin America, drawing out lessons that can be applied internationally. This book will be of great interest to professionals in disaster management, including national governments, donors, communities/citizens, NGOs and private sector. It will also be a highly valuable resource for students and researchers in disaster management and policy, development studies and economics.

Why aren’t we investing more in disaster resilience, despite the rising costs of disaster events? This book argues that decision-makers in governments, businesses, households, and development agencies tend to focus on avoiding losses from disasters, and perceive the return on investment as uncertain – only realised if a somewhat unlikely disaster event actually happens. This book develops a new business case for investment based on the multiple dividends of resilience. This looks beyond only avoided losses (the first dividend) to the wider benefits gained independently of whether or not the disaster event occurs. These include unleashing entrepreneurial activities and productive investments by lowering the looming threat of losses from disasters and enabling businesses, farmers and homeowners to take positive risks (the second dividend); and co-benefits of resilience measures beyond just disaster risk (the third dividend), such as flood embankments in Bangladesh that double as roads, or wetlands in Colombo that reduce urban heat extremes.

As the population is growing and urbanization is progressing, higher numbers of people are exposed to disaster risks, especially in the developing countries. Climate change is further worsening the impacts of existing risks and introducing new ones. It is imperative that countries need to invest more in disaster risk reduction (DRR) as well as climate change adaptation (CCA) not only to minimize their impacts but also to build resilience. To date, various international arenas have recommended increasing investment in DRR. The Sendai Framework for DRR, adopted by the UN member states in 2015 during the Third UN World Conference on DRR, emphasizes investment as a priority for decreasing disaster risks and losses. The Yangon Declaration set the goal of doubling investment to address water-related disasters. However, most countries are not able to proactively invest enough in DRR. Understanding the current scale and estimate of investment and its effects is crucial for promoting DRR investment, but such information and estimates are rarely available. This book examines the current investment trends and issues in DRR and CCA. Based on specific case studies, field data and evidence, the book identifies challenges in increasing investment and recommends various investment policies and innovative approaches to sustainable progress towards a resilient future. Chapter 12 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

This book is part of a six-volume series on Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience. The series aims to fill in gaps in theory and practice in the Sendai Framework, and provides additional resources, methodologies and communication strategies to enhance the plan for action and targets proposed by the Sendai Framework. The series will appeal to a broad range of researchers, academics, students, policy makers and practitioners in engineering, environmental science and geography, geoscience, emergency management, finance, community adaptation, atmospheric science and information technology. This volume discusses how to measure and build disaster resilience at society’s capacity, drawing upon individual, institutional and collective resources to cope with and adapt to the demands and challenges of natural disaster occurrences. The book will serve as a guide, outlining the key indicators of disaster resilience in urban and rural settings, and the resources and strategies needed to build resilient communities in accordance with the targets of the Sendai Framework. Readers will learn about multi-risk reduction approaches using computational methods, data mining techniques, and System Thinking at various scales, as well as institutional and infrastructure resilience strategies based on several case studies.