Resilience in the Polycrisis. Addressing multiple risks through multiple resilience dividends

Despite wide-spread recognition and rhetoric regarding the burdens imposed by simple and systemic disaster and climate risks as well as solid evidence regarding the benefits of reducing risk, it has remained difficult to motivate sustained investment into disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) at individual project level as well as country scale. To this effect, international policy debate over the last years in the wake of the international compacts of 2015 has emphasized the need for orienting such investments toward interventions that generate so-called triple or multiple resilience dividends. Such dividends include reducing loss of lives and livelihoods, unlocking development, and creating development co-benefits. In addition to risk reduction benefits from project investment (1st dividend), these suggested dividends would arise from positive externalities, such as unlocked development (2nd dividend) and co-benefits (3rd dividend), e.g. investment into health systems with returns from treating disaster-affected patients and those affected by idiosyncratic events, such as from disease or accidents. In economic parlance, externalities (also called spill-overs) can be considered the benefits (if positive) or costs (if negative) not directly captured in market prices or transactions. In our discussion, we consider externalities as the unplanned positive or negative effects arising from risk management investment. While externalities have been considered in sustainability decision-making for public sector investment decisions for many issues, in DRR and CCA they are generally not yet well captured, which gave rise to the concept of triple dividend decision-making propositions.  

Yet, while triple and multi resilience dividend decision-making have received attention in policy and practice over the last decade, evidence remains scarce, particularly as to the 2nd dividend (the externalities). We suggest that systemic risk research with its focus on interdependent systems coupled with resilience dividend decision-making reasoning may point a way forward for improved decision-making on disaster and climate risks (reduction). 

This article queries what resilience assessment methods, metrics and evidence exist to address interconnected systemic and global catastrophic risks for informing efforts towards transformational resilience across systems. Based on insights and examples from decision-making analysis as well as systemic risk research we show how analysts and decision-makers can better consider the various resilience dividends, i.e., positive externalities and co-benefits of disaster risk reduction measures beyond the reduction of losses and assess dependencies in risk and benefits' creation across micro and macro scales. As we suggest, this may enable a more comprehensive evaluation of interventions with benefits arising at various scales, thus in many cases, where there are strong dependencies across systems, such benefits may result in reduced cost (trade-offs) and increased benefits (or synergies) for risk reduction and resilience.