Five innovative ways to bring resilience home
Homes are where we live, where we love, where we return to every day.
And when disasters strike, our homes are what either protect us… or leave us exposed. For disaster survivors, the first priority, after securing their loved ones' safety, is to return to, rebuild, and protect their homes.
This is why resilience starts at home.
Exposure to climate and disaster risk is often most acutely felt at the household level, by individuals and families. Risk depends on the home's physical qualities: the material a roof is built from, the depth of foundations, or the protection nature provides.
We've always innovated to adapt our homes to the hazards around us: stilts above floodwaters, thick walls against extreme heat, ventilation against smoke. We have also adopted the resilience of the natural environment to protect us: using natural features to shelter us from extreme heat and cold, ferocious weather, or unstable ground.
The examples below show how innovation is being used around the world to protect people and their homes from disaster risk – new technologies and new applications of old methods and nature-based solutions.
1. Open-source, community-led construction
In Vietnam, a partnership between the Green Climate Fund, UNDP, and the national government is supporting storm- and flood-resilient housing for poor and near-poor households across five coastal provinces.
The innovation extends beyond design: using the open-source platform KoboToolbox, households document their own construction progress, giving residents direct oversight of whether a build meets standards rather than relying solely on external inspection.
Applying innovations like Kobo promotes efficiency and transparency and empowers the community to participate actively in the project.
2. Houses that float above the floodwaters
Elsewhere, flood response is being redesigned around accommodation rather than resistance.
In the Netherlands, a UK architecture firm and a Dutch manufacturer are developing homes built on buoyant pontoons that rise with floodwater instead of attempting to keep it out, reversing the conventional engineering logic of holding a line against rising water.
The modular construction keeps building costs down, and the houses will have solar panels and heat exchangers, allowing them to generate their own electricity and withstand power outages.
3. AI-enhanced residential risk mapping
Machine learning is also being applied to housing risk.
The World Bank's Global Program for Resilient Housing trains algorithms on satellite and street-level imagery to assess building height, material and structural type at scale, then reassesses affected areas after a disaster to measure what changed.
In Guatemala City, images and algorithms were used to locate “soft-storey” buildings – buildings at least two stories high that have a structurally weak first floor, making them vulnerable to collapse during earthquakes. After scanning 4,967 homes, the computer detected 503 possible soft storeys with 85% accuracy, prompting more in-depth inspection.
In hurricane-prone Saint Lucia, a geospatial housing inventory of over 10,000 buildings, including the shape, material, and condition of their rooftops, was used to estimate the potential housing damages and losses from a Category-5 hurricane. The system then disseminated automatically generated household-level information to homeowners and authorities, providing baseline data to guide decisions on risk-reduction measures.
4. A new look at old methods of making resilient homes
Not all innovation is new. Traditional housing designs reflect generations of iterative innovations, refining and adapting construction to protect households against the specific hazards they face.
In Kerala, flood-resistant houses sit on pillars, letting floodwater pass beneath rather than through them. In Vietnam, traditional house orientation and high-rise rooms improve ventilation without mechanical intervention. Round-shaped homes and frangible roof design, engineered to fail in controlled ways, help structures shed cyclone winds rather than resist them outright.
Rediscovering and applying these traditional approaches require no new materials, only the deliberate reapplication of design principles that have often fallen out of use in standard building codes.
5. Mangroves save money – and homes – from storms and surges
US$4.1 billion: that’s what mangroves were worth to the homes behind them when Hurricane Ian hit in 2022, research from UC Santa Cruz's Center for Coastal Climate Resilience and East Carolina University has calculated.
Using industry catastrophe-risk models, the standard tools insurers rely on, the study found that mangroves significantly reduced storm surge and property damage during Hurricanes Irma (2017) and Ian (2022), by $725 million and $4.1 billion respectively.
In Florida's Collier County alone, mangroves provide an estimated 67 million dollars in storm surge protection every year. The effect isn't uniform: homes set back from the coastline benefit most, while some properties directly in front of the mangrove forest saw higher damages.
It's the first study to value that protection using the same risk models the insurance industry already uses, which makes the case harder to dismiss as an advocacy estimate.
These examples show that resilient housing outcomes rarely come from a single intervention. They result from a combination of monitoring technology, structural design and ecological restoration, applied at household scale.
The evidence shows that some of the most effective tools available are not new inventions, but existing systems – natural or traditional – restored, injected with new approaches and technologies, and applied in a deliberate way.
In 2026, International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction – observed on 13 October – focuses on how homes and households can build resilience and reduce disaster risk… because resilience starts at home.