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The entire world seems to have responded to COVID-19 pandemic in a knee-jerk manner with a short mindset without building on the existing strengths of public health infrastructure. National governments cannot be blamed for this as we are dealing with a crisis that comes once in a lifetime. Realising this, the Organized Medicine Academic Guild (OMAG) an association of major health associations in this country has suggested measures for long-term solutions to COVID-19-like pandemics in the form of a policy paper by OMAG.

Climate extremes and longer‐term climate change impacts threaten the achievement of development goals (Damania et al., 2017; IBRD, 2018). In 2030, up to 319 million extremely poor people will be living in the 45 countries most exposed to floods, droughts and heat extremes (Shepherd et al., 2013). According to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on 1.5°C global warming, a 2°C increase in temperature will double 1 the number of people exposed to drought through water stress (IPCC, 2018). To eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, development cooperation and domestic action in the developing world is increasingly concerned with building resilience to these climate hazards (SDG Goal 1.5). Amid lively critical debates, the resilience‐building agenda has sparked a proliferation of projects in recent years. Resilience programmes are being implemented in some of the most climate‐vulnerable, institutionally fragile and unstable settings around the world. Often, they focus on improving people's access to climate and weather information, resources or markets, helping them plan ahead and navigate environmental change and uncertainty in the future. Importantly, resilience‐building is anticipated to give greater agency to vulnerable people and produce more co‐benefits or ‘dividends’ than conventional international development approaches (Rodin, 2014; Tanner et al., 2015a, 2015b; Bond et al., 2017; Cabot Venton, 2018; Cabot Venton et al., 2012). Building resilience from the ground up is critical because of the context‐specific nature of climate change and disaster impacts and the need to ensure the engagement of vulnerable groups. The five‐year, £100m UK Department for International Development (DFID) programme on Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) is one example of this intervention logic. Alongside the implementation of 15 projects in 13 countries, research and monitoring and evaluation, knowledge‐sharing activities that have taken place under BRACED present a unique opportunity to learn about how poor people and communities deal with climate shocks and other hazards in different contexts, their vulnerabilities and the kinds of interventions that can help strengthen their resilience. Similarly, the Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme funded by DFID for five years to provide technical and financial support to governments across five South Asian countries had a lesson‐learning function to share experiences and knowledge across the programme and with the outside world. This special issue of Disasters reflects on resilience‐building supported via BRACED and ACT in some of the world's most climate‐vulnerable countries and contexts. These programmes have focused on scaling up action to build resilience, 2 principally through the expansion and replication of good practices by influencing government policies, plans and investments. The papers provide insights that are each grounded in different contexts and understandings of local realities and the factors that support and undermine people's resilience. The BRACED articles emphasise the importance of this ground‐level engagement. They also highlight a range of different opportunities for intervening in the broader social structures and decision‐making processes that shape these local realities. The focus of the ACT article is explicitly and exclusively concerned with national and local government policy‐making and how this can be influenced. Each of the seven papers selected for this special issue was written by teams of researchers and practitioners engaged in the BRACED and ACT programmes, based in the Global South and North in a range of country contexts from the Sahel to Southeast Asia. Each brings a different perspective on the significance and operationalisation of efforts to build resilience to climate extremes and disasters. The contributing authors describe resilience‐building at different scales, for different types of projects and interventions: from gender‐differentiated perspectives within households in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Chad (Le Masson et al., 2019; McOmber et al., 2019), to devolved community planning and financing in Mali and Senegal (Beauchamp et al., 2019); from sector‐wide agricultural extension support in Sudan (Young and Ismail, 2019), to early warning systems in Ethiopia and Nicaragua (Ewbank et al., 2019), national social protection programmes in Ethiopia (Ulrichs et al., 2019) and advocacy for mainstreaming into government policy in South Asia (Tanner et al., 2019). It is important to understand that the projects of the BRACED and ACT programmes, which inspired the articles in this special issue, did not and could not invest in long‐term studies of the kind that could test the hypotheses of the resilience‐building programmes – that, through these sets of interventions, people's resilience could be enhanced and hence the negative impact of climate extremes and longer‐term climate change be reduced. This was because of the brief implementation time frames of both programmes. This is a common challenge with project‐based interventions, where the assessment of potential impacts needs to be done simultaneously with the investments intended to achieve these impacts. As such, these articles are not based on routine evidence of results produced through monitoring, learning and evaluation activities, but rather are selected expert reflections on the projects. They are intended for scientific peer review and journal publication, not project evaluation. The articles present rich and detailed descriptions and reflections from their respective fields and contexts, which we do not exhaustively or definitively summarise in this overview. Rather, this overview paper aims to gently pique the curiosity of readers, and to reflect briefly on the critical questions that the articles help address, which have hereto remain largely unresolved in resilience debates. We select and draw out insights from this special issue that feed into these debates, and highlight their significance for the wider community of humanitarian and development practitioners. Following a brief overview of how the term ‘resilience’ is being used in each of the articles, we then examine how each has approached the challenge of understanding and measuring bottom‐up interventions. We consider the multiple benefits or resilience dividends that make some of these projects unique, and reflect on what the authors consider are the prospects for effecting deeper structural, or transformative changes.

What consequences does ‘everyday violence’ have on the abilities of survivors to protect themselves from further risks? This paper seeks to establish the linkages between violence and people's resilience capacities to survive and adapt to environmental changes, particularly those living in fragile economic and political contexts such as Chad. It investigates not only how the adverse consequences of violence against women and girls affect the health status and livelihoods of survivors, but also their capacities, and those of their household and community members, to further protect themselves from other risks. Empirical evidence collected in Chad as part of the BRACED (Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters) programme shows that ‘everyday violence’ undermines resilience‐building at the individual, household, and community level. These results have serious implications for development programmes and the role they need to play to better promote both gender equality and resilience to shocks and stresses.

If you are a veterinary professional working in general practice in the UK, you cannot have failed to notice the increase in the number of dogs originating from overseas being registered at clinics. Love it or hate it, the topic of importation of overseas rescue dogs to the UK is a hot topic that is attracting vibrant and heated debate. The number of dogs imported to the UK is growing rapidly. Under the EU Balai Directive, commercial imports of dogs from Romania – the most common country of origin for imported rescue dogs1 – alone increased from 3616 in 2014 to 19,487 in 2019.2 While these figures do not only include rescue dogs, and may underestimate the true number of rescue dogs imported due to illegal imports,1 they do give a broad indication that adopting an overseas dog is an increasingly popular choice for would-be dog owners. Thus, veterinary professionals on the frontline will increasingly encounter rescue dogs imported from overseas and be asked by their clients to provide advice and guidance across a range of health and welfare topics. Translocation and importation of rescue dogs is not a phenomenon unique to the UK, with many countries around the world moving rescue dogs across countries or states from areas of low to high demand.3 However, the translocation of rescue dogs has raised concerns about the health risks this poses for native animals and people,3-8 with poor owner awareness of travel-related diseases.9 This has led to expert discussion10 and position statement development,11 which has helped provide veterinary professionals with improved knowledge of the potential healthcare risks associated with importing dogs. However, very little is known about the frequency with which imported rescue dogs, either as a whole or at the export country level, …

Recognized for conducting cutting-edge science in the field of radiation health effects research, the Department of Energy's (DOE) Russian Health Studies Program has continued to generate excitement and enthusiasm throughout its 23-year mission to assess worker and public health risks from radiation exposure resulting from nuclear weapons production activities in the former Soviet Union. The three goals of the Program are to: (1) clarify the relationship between health effects and chronic, low-to-medium dose radiation exposure; (2) estimate the cancer risks from exposure to gamma, neutron, and alpha radiation; and (3) provide information to the national and international organizations that determine radiation protection standards and practices. Research sponsored by DOE's Russian Health Studies Program is conducted under the authority of the Joint Coordinating Committee for Radiation Effects Research (JCCRER), a bi-national committee representing Federal agencies in the United States and the Russian Federation. Signed in 1994, the JCCRER Agreement established the legal basis for the collaborative research between USA and Russian scientists to determine the risks associated with working at or living near Russian former nuclear weapons production sites. The products of the Program are peer-reviewed publications on cancer risk estimates from worker and community exposure to ionizing radiation following the production of nuclear weapons in Russia. The scientific return on investment has been substantial. Through 31 December 2015, JCCRER researchers have published 299 peer-reviewed publications. To date, the research has focused on the Mayak Production Association (Mayak) in Ozersk, Russia, which is the site of the first Soviet nuclear weapons production facility, and people in surrounding communities along the Techa River. There are five current projects in the Russian Health Studies Program: two radiation epidemiology studies; two historical dose reconstruction studies and a worker biorepository. National and international standard-setting organizations use cancer risk estimates computed from epidemiological and historical dose reconstruction studies to validate or revise radiation protection standards. An overview of the most important research results will be presented.

This paper analyzes the socioeconomic, fiscal, and governance impact of gold mining in Mali. The analysis finds that, at the national level, mining plays an important role by contributing to export earnings and overall government fiscal revenue. In 2013, the mining sector represented 7 percent of gross domestic product, contributed 1.5 percent to growth in total gross domestic product, and accounted for 65 percent of total export earnings and 25 percent of total government budget revenues. At the local level, despite higher population growth, there is some evidence that outcomes (poverty and infrastructure services) are marginally better in mining communes compared with non-mining communes. Local governments receive fiscal windfalls that are spent significantly on education capital expenditures and current expenditures (salaries and non-salaries). Non-salary current expenditures are 10 times higher in mining areas. Analysis of the political economy of public service provision at the local level suggests that technical or absorptive capacities may be the bottleneck to increasing the local benefit of mining instead of corruption or accountability.