News
More investment in under-funded hydrometeorological services is urgently needed in the face of growing exposure to weather and water related hazards which are being compounded by climate change, urbanization and population increase.
The publication, Building Regulation for Resilience – Managing Risks for Safer Cities was written by a co-author of this article, World Bank senior operations officer Thomas Moullier. This paramount World Bank initiative has involved extensive international consultation with disaster recovery and disaster mitigation knowledge tsars and experts.
Understanding risk is more than just modeling risk; it requires an understanding of the development and social processes that underlie and drive the generation of disaster risk. Here, in addition to a review of more technical factors, this paper aims to discuss a variety of institutional, social and political considerations that must be managed for the results of a risk assessment to influence actions that lead to reductions in natural hazard risk.
Farmers in Kenya are set to benefit from the launch of a new innovative, index insurance scheme which utilizes advanced technology and satellite data to assist agricultural workers in the face of flooding and drought conditions.
Natural disasters can cause unthinkable tolls and continue to disproportionately affect the poorest and most vulnerable. When the category five Cyclone Pam barreled down on Vanuatu in March, the destruction was unprecedented.
Climate change cannot be isolated from other drivers of disaster risk, and needs to be tackled alongside them
After the island sustained severe damage in a tropical storm, Dominica's economy has suffered horrendously. To assess the full extent of the damage, the World Bank, United Nations, and other development partners with funding support of the European Union (EU) and the World Bank Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery put their resources together to study the problem. What they found proved shocking.
Major international partnerships under the Lima to Paris Action Agenda are mobilizing large-scale financing to protect people who the most vulnerable from climate impacts, reflecting the fact that building a climate-resilient world is essential to secure hard-won development gains and ensure that future investment is not lost to climate change
The governments of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Luxembourg and The Netherlands have agreed to give more than US$80 million to equip up to 80 countries with better climate risk early warning systems.
This year, the rate of extreme global poverty is expected to fall below 10%, dropping into single digits for the first time in history. Inclusive economic growth, especially in China and India, has driven this success.