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By Rachel Norton (ISET-International), Barbara Rosen Jacobson (Mercy Corps), Kanmani Venkateswaran (ISET-International), Karen MacClune (ISET-International), and Debbie Hillier (Mercy Corps).
Introduction
The climate crisis is causing more frequent and more severe disasters, trapping people in a spiral of loss, unable to recover and rebuild their lives before the next climate shock hits. Yet despite growing recovery needs, recovery efforts remain underfunded, and typically rebuild only to current conditions at best. Future impacts of cascading and compounding climate risks fail to be considered, and broader social, economic, and environmental recovery are often overlooked. As a result, the bulk of recovery needs are often met and paid for by vulnerable households themselves, or by borrowing from neighbours and local moneylenders. For example, in Bangladesh, households spend almost US$2 billion a year on climate change adaptation and disaster recovery – which is more than double compared to government spending and 12 times more than international spending (Eskander and Steele, 2020).
With losses and damages from climate change estimated to reach $290–580 billion in 2030 and $1–1.8 trillion in 2050 for developing countries (LSE, 2022), it is clear that investment is needed across the full disaster risk management (DRM) cycle – from risk reduction, to preparedness, to response, to a resilient recovery – to minimise climate impacts where possible and build back more resiliently when impacts are unavoidable. In this context, there is a need to focus on, and invest in, designing recovery to be as future-proof as possible. In 2015, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (the Sendai Framework) set out the principle of ‘build back better’ in its priority actions, and experts estimated that investing in building back better could reduce disaster losses by 40 per cent in highly vulnerable countries (Hallegatte et al., 2018). Nonetheless, the findings of the Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework states that progress has been ‘limited’, and ‘significant opportunities are missed to build back better, to accelerate development and improve resilience post-disaster’ (UNGA, 2023).
This report asserts the need not only for a recovery that effectively brings a community back to the place they were before the disaster, but a recovery that is resilient – a recovery that harnesses climate science to account for changing, cascading, and compounded risks, that actively includes the most marginalised groups, and that considers all dimensions of social, physical, and environmental resilience.
The potential of resilient recovery
If recovery is designed to build resilience, it will significantly reduce vulnerability, exposure, and therefore risk (see Figure 1 in the PDF). Instead of ‘bouncing back’ after a disaster, there is an opportunity to bounce forward to create a ‘positive transformation’ to address underlying risk factors (Sudmeier-Rieux et. al., 2019, p. 97).
Resilient recovery not only creates benefits for human lives, livelihoods, and well-being, it can also save affected households and communities, as well as national governments and donors, significant money. Estimates suggest that for every $1 invested in risk reduction and preparedness, including through well planned and executed post-disaster recovery, there are savings of $15 in future crises. And according to the World Bank, if all countries were to build back stronger during a 20-year window, then global asset losses due to disaster events would be reduced by 11.2 per cent, from $382 billion to $339 billion annually.
However, there are far-reaching and severe consequences when resilient recovery is not the norm, consequences that amplify disaster impacts and hinder long-term progress, including:
Economic costs: If recovery is not resilient, the same or greater costs will need to be borne to rebuild and restore the same services and structures after the next disaster. At household, local government, and national government levels, the cumulative financial burden can become overwhelming, diverting funds from other critical areas of development and hindering long-term economic growth. Not implementing resilient recovery can lead to prolonged economic instability and decline, perpetuating a cycle of poverty and dependence. According to one Bangladeshi: ‘Every year, we build a house, and every year a flood takes away our house… we have limited income. With the money we should use to feed ourselves, we use that to build the house’ (Sylhet and Sunamganj, 2022).
Livelihoods: Disasters have devastating effects on livelihoods of all kinds, destroying assets, investments, and infrastructure, disrupting business continuity, and preventing the sale of products at markets. This is compounded by the increased frequency of disasters. For example, in the weeks after Typhoon Noru hit the Philippines in September 2022, farmers started planting their crops, only to see them destroyed again by Tropical Storm Nalgae the following month (Beltran, 2022). As one farmer from the Tarlac province asked, ‘How can we feed ourselves and continue farming knowing the next misfortune for our harvest can happen at any time?’ (ibid).
Increasing inequalities: Disasters affect everyone, but the impacts are felt very differently: for some people, the impacts of a disaster could be relatively limited, whereas for others they can be catastrophic. The negative effects of climate disasters disproportionately fall on the most vulnerable individuals and households, who risk falling into poverty traps from which they cannot escape. If this is not proactively addressed during the recovery phase, it exacerbates existing inequalities and can lead to social fragmentation.
Environmental degradation: Disasters can result in salinisation, the release of hazardous substances, contamination of water and sanitation facilities, and damages to ecosystems (UNEP and ISDR, 2009). Failure to integrate environmental considerations into recovery can lead not only to continued environmental degradation but also to adverse effects on people’s health and well-being (World Health Organization, 2002), in addition to increasing the likelihood of disasters happening in the future.
While the need for resilient recovery has been recognised in policy and guidance documents in the disaster risk reduction (DRR) sector, there remain considerable gaps in resilient recovery implementation and financing that urgently need to be resolved, as confirmed by the Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework (UNGA, 2023). Outside the DRR sector, resilient recovery has not been central in policy and finance discussions, though there is a growing window to policy change. The G20 DRR working group provides a new forum to enable progress on resilient recovery, and the UNFCCC has started to address recovery in the context of Loss and Damage discussions at United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). These developments provide a key new opportunity to enable resilient recovery within broader climate and finance discussions.
This report seeks to engage national and international policymakers and foster debate and catalyse action for a stronger focus on, and funding for, resilient recovery. Our goal is that the learning from this report, and the approach that we propose, will help governments and donors make resilient recovery a reality for the most vulnerable who are already bearing the brunt of today’s climate crisis.
