Resilience Dividends and Resilience Windfalls: Narratives That Tie Disaster Resilience Co-Benefits to Long-Term Sustainability

Jennifer Helgeson and Cheyney O’Fallon
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Jennifer Helgeson: Applied Economics Office, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA
Cheyney O’Fallon: Smart Grid and Cyber-Physical Systems Program Office, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 8, 1-27

Abstract: The need for increased disaster resilience planning, especially at the community level, as well as the need to address sustainability are clear; these dual objectives have been deemed national priorities in a number of recent US Executive Orders. Major global climate agreements, (i.e., the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, Paris Climate Agreement, and the Sustainable Development Goals) all emphasize the need to integrate disaster resilience and climate risks with continued sustainable development concerns. Current ways of assessing synergies and trade-offs across planning for disaster resilience and sustainability in investment projects that impact communities are limited. The driving research question in this paper is how researchers and practitioners may better express relative categories of co-benefits to meet this need. We draw upon the categorization of some co-benefits as contributing to the resilience dividend, which has helped communication across fields and created bridges from research to practical on-the-ground planning in recent years. Furthermore, we leverage the growing focus on the need to recognize the role of narratives in driving decisions about how and where to invest, which elucidates the inherent value of archetypes that resonate across stakeholders and disciplines to describe investments that may meet multiple objectives. We introduce the concept of a resilience windfall as an unexpected or sudden gain or advantage of resilience planning to be conceptualized alongside resilience dividends. We then assess the practicality of discerning resilience windfalls across various projects that have aspects of both resilience and sustainability. We recount five narrative vignettes that demonstrate disaster resilience interventions and associated resilience dividends and windfalls. This effort highlights the importance of considering resilience dividends and resilience windfalls during the planning, execution, and evaluation phases of disaster resilience projects. These typologies provide an important contribution to the integration agenda between disaster resilience, climate risks, and sustainable development. There are policy implications of framing incentives for interventions that address both disaster resilience and long-term sustainability objectives as well as encouraging robust tracking of both resilience dividends and windfalls.

Keywords: co-benefits; community resilience; disaster resilience; resilience dividend; resilience windfall; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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