Adaptive Social Protection - an innovative approach to build resilience in a multi-hazard environment

Many countries face high risk to multiple natural hazards - such as earthquakes, floods, storms or extreme heat - which jeopardize human security around the globe. At the same time, a significant part of the world’s population is still living in poverty, often facing an increased vulnerability to hazards. On top it is often the most poor and vulnerable living in high-risk places. Hence, they are often disproportionally affected by disasters, facing significant development set-backs after disastrous events.

In response, many risk management and poverty reduction strategies have been applied in accordance with global agendas - such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction – to strengthen disaster resilience. These range from early warning systems to the deployment financial mechanisms, and several specific disaster risk management (DRM), climate change adaptation (CCA), as well as livelihood support and other social protection (SP) programmes. Thus, many different streams have evolved, which, however, work towards similar goals and objectives. Those efforts are therefore often scattered and lacking cooperation and integration, hence preventing or hampering effective, well-coordinated risk management.

To overcome this deficit, Adaptive Social Protection has recently emerged as a promising approach to integrate SP, CCA and DRM with the goal to effectively build resilience to climate-related and other natural hazards. Best practices from several countries underline that this integrative approach provides a meaningful risk management option for the most vulnerable. However, ASP is still not well researched and lacks consideration on international level and in most countries’ approaches to build resilience.

This presentation will outline results from an extensive systematic literature review and highlight recent ASP developments and best practices from around the globe, as well as accenting protection gaps and entry points for ASP implementation. Drawing on this review and an ongoing study on the country of Indonesia, steps towards an effective ASP approach in will be discussed that will help building resilience in a multi-hazard environment.