Co-benefits of Disaster Risk Management: The Third Dividend of Resilience

Building resilience to climate extremes and disasters can achieve multiple objectives, which can be secondary to the main aim of disaster risk management (DRM) of avoiding disaster losses but can enhance the attractiveness of DRM investments. Co-benefits are often economic, such as investment in dams or irrigation to reduce drought risk, generating greater productivity, but can also be environmental and social. This chapter identifies some of the potential categories of these co-benefits, expanding on typologies created by agencies promoting social and environmental safeguarding in their work. We also look back at previous studies of DRM that mention co-benefits but do not explore them in any detail and examine two new case studies of environmental and socioeconomic co-benefits, one in Jamaica and one in Mexico . We point to a number of challenges in traditional cost–benefit analysis techniques and put forward alternative approaches to identifying environmental and socioeconomic co-benefits when planning DRM investments. We argue that a comprehensive DRM co-benefits framework is needed that includes and categorises all potential positive environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Co-benefits research focused on revisiting existing cases and developing new case studies could play an important role in this regard.