Financing DRR

During a 100-year geomagnetic storm, 3.5 million people and 91,000 businesses are predicted to lose power, with daily economic losses of $1.22 billion.

In Marigot, two spring-fed water systems faced the same storm. One continued delivering water while the other failed completely, showing how early investment in source protection and disaster risk reduction can strengthen resilience.

The Himalayan flood exposed a risk that begins beyond Nepal’s borders – and demands a response that does too.

Study uses the 2020 Gjerdrum landslide as a natural experiment to examine how climate risk salience affects housing markets. Exposed properties experienced temporary price declines of 1–1.5 per cent, while new residential development in risk zones fell.

This paper examines how remittances influence household expenditure during drought and excess rainfall in the Kyrgyz Republic.

New Zealand is not on track to adapt to growing climate risks, nor is it cutting emissions quickly enough, according to the latest reports issued by the Climate Change Commission.

From sugar and cocoa to copper and credit, El Niño could create divergent risks across commodities, regions and asset classes.

Polycrisis -multiple and often overlapping crises- create new vulnerabilities. They have severe effects on countries in sub-Saharan Africa with high poverty levels where weak institutions and limited public resources make it hard to respond effectively.

The Adaptation finance taxonomy playbook helps the implementation of taxonomy approaches through practical tools. Financial institutions can apply these tools to effectively identify, assess and scale adaptation finance opportunities across jurisdictions.

A model developed by Washington State University researchers could someday help communities determine how best to motivate homeowners to prepare their properties for possible wildfires.

Simulation games are not new in disaster risk and climate adaptation. Layer Up! builds on this tradition but addresses a gap: questions about the trade-offs between different risk financing instruments.

A paper provides the first global, systematic analysis of adaptive social protection program effectiveness. It finds that when the goal is to prevent deeper poverty, targeting meaningful support to the poorest outperforms spreading the same budget thin.

This report quantifies the health and economic loss and damage that extreme heat inflicts on informal workers, a group that makes up close to 90% of India's workforce yet remains largely invisible in heat-risk assessments.

This post-disaster needs assessment examines the impacts of the 2024 floods in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. It identifies humanitarian needs and priority actions to support recovery and strengthen resilience.

This policy brief examines Nepal's opportunity to leverage the Barbados Implementation Modalities (BIM) start-up phase to access the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD).

Climate-related disasters are becoming one of Asia’s most important economic and fiscal challenges.

This working paper examines how Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten finance disaster recovery and why they make limited use of modern disaster risk financing instruments despite their high exposure to natural hazards.

This report shows how disaster risk financing reaches – or fails to reach – frontline actors, and identifies practical ways to close the gaps that keep timely, adequate, locally led financing out of reach.

This evaluation addresses gaps related to the catastrophe deferred drawdown option (Cat DDO). espite its growing adoption, empirical evidence on the Cat DDO’s effectiveness remains limited, particularly regarding its role in post-disaster financing.

This paper examines why extreme weather resilience is becoming a core priority for infrastructure investors and how it should be built into investment decisions.

Wetlands protect communities and ecosystems from flooding. A study quantifies their financial importance.

This working paper (No. 1048) investigates how banks adjust credit supply in response to temperature-related climate risk, using a firm-bank level panel of French single-establishment micro and SME firms from 2010 to 20

The guide, previously published in 2023, expanded its coverage to include an analysis of anticipatory action and early warning systems and the fiscal case for pre-disaster financing.

A hybrid institutional capital model could package small infrastructure resilience projects to make them attractive to institutional investors, a new research paper proposes.

The government has designed what it calls a "continuum of support", a two-instrument financing package that layers government resources on top of existing humanitarian delivery systems.

Smart thermostats and connected devices are helping some utilities reduce strain on the grid.

This policy brief provides a first entry point for governments who have endorsed or are implementing aspects of the Comprehensive School Safety Framework (CSSF) to identify potential financial resources they can access, and how to secure them.

The objective of this report is to summarize Zambia’s financial preparedness to crises and disasters at the sovereign, firm, and household levels. In this context, the focus is on the fiscal implications of the emergency response to shocks for the GRZ.

This report presents updated findings from WFP’s Return on Investment (ROI) for Preparedness study, demonstrating the value of pre-shock investments in strengthening emergency response.

This strategy aims to strengthen national and county governments’ financial capacity to manage disaster risks across the DRM continuum, protect vulnerable groups, safeguard development gains, build resilience, and maintain fiscal stability.

This report presents a comparative synthesis of how stakeholders in three Caribbean Small Island Developing States — Belize, Grenada, and Jamaica — value the core attributes of pre-arranged financing (PAF) for sovereign disaster risk.

This report presents the first cross-country study to use a structured simulation to elicit how policymakers in five African countries value the core attributes of pre-arranged financing (PAF) systems for disaster response.

This policy brief presents the first cross-country study of what governments want from pre-arranged financing (PAF) — funding secured in advance to respond to disasters.

Developing economies in Asia and the Pacific are caught in a dangerous feedback loop: rising debt burdens are constraining their ability to invest in climate action, while climate shocks are worsening fiscal pressures and increasing debt risks.

This report highlights a significant gap in dedicated public financing for heat resilience In India.

This report explores how governments can finance heat resilience through risk-informed investments, innovative financing mechanisms, and resilient infrastructure to protect lives, livelihoods, and economies from rising extreme heat risks.

This guide outlines a set of principles and processes for resilience investment in Australia aimed at fostering effective, sustainable, and long-term resilience-building initiatives.

A new study projects the intertwined relationship between fires and the money spent fighting them.

Our climate is changing rapidly, and most of the world is not prepared. But with the right tools and climate-smart investments, governments can keep people alive and ensure functioning health systems as these disasters escalate.

Agriculture is on the frontlines of climate change impacts. Droughts, floods, erratic rainfall and seasonal changes are already affecting crop yields, livestock productivity and rural livelihoods, particularly in developing countries.

This study proposes a flexible framework to assess the economic value of weather forecasts, with penalty functions that explicitly account for compounding losses as well as declining user trust in cases of repeated false alarms.