Investing in Resilience: Ensuring a Disaster-Resistant Future

Natural hazards continue to cause significant loss of life and have significant social and economic consequences for people in Asia and the Pacific. Yet, these losses are far from inevitable. There is a wide range of tools and mechanisms available to assess, reduce, and manage risk, covering a vast array of legislative, regulatory, policy, planning, institutional, financial, and capacity-building instruments. Moreover, there is increasing public awareness of the need to strengthen disaster resilience at all levels of society as a critical component of efforts to achieve sustainable socioeconomic development and poverty reduction.

This report offers an approach and ideas for reflection, inviting readers to consider how we can ensure that the actions that we know are required to strengthen resilience are actually taken. It is primarily aimed at investors in the public sphere, namely governments and their development partners.

The report is not a manual or handbook and deliberately does not present prescribed courses of action. Instead, it establishes a vision of a resilient future and equips investors with a framework and ideas to identify practical actions that will result in the realization of that vision.

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. It stresses the interconnectedness and complementarity of possible actions to achieve resilience across a wide range of development policies, plans, legislation, sectors, and themes.