Letters from Sendai no. 5: unlocking the triple resilience dividend

The fifth letter, by Swenja Surminski of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics, was posted on 17 March 2015. It covered the launch in Sendai of an interim report titled “Unlocking the triple resilience dividend”, on making the economic case for disaster risk management.

The report’s authors included experts from the World Bank, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the Overseas Development Institute, together with two ENHANCE partners: Surminski herself and Reinhard Mechler of IIASA.

Its starting point was a weakness in the usual argument. Investment in risk management is normally justified by the losses it avoids, but that return only arrives when a disaster happens, and in a quiet decade it looks like money spent on nothing. The report added two further benefits:

• reducing background risk unlocks development, because households and firms invest more when they are less exposed;
• many investments bring co-benefits, such as evacuation boats that are also used for fishing.

Surminski linked the theme to the Financing for Development conference due in Addis Ababa later in 2015 and to the tight risk-management budgets in several ENHANCE case-study countries.

The letter built directly on the session reported in the previous letter, where Stephane Hallegatte had first presented the dividends idea. The next letter moved to the negotiating rooms (no. 6).