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Improving flood resilience of communities requires a holistic understanding of risks and resilience options, and of the preferences and priorities of different stakeholders in order to design and implement inclusive and proactive interventions. This goes beyond the traditional appraisals and costbenefit assessment commonly used by decision-makers and calls for a participatory process in which various stakeholders are encouraged to adopt a system-level approach in identifying and selecting interventions that can maximise a range of benefits and co-benefits. In this study, we investigate how a combination of modelling and measurement methods can help decision-makers with their flood resilience strategies. We apply a participatory system thinking approach combining Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) with a flood resilience measurement framework called Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC). In this approach, we first investigate stakeholders’ biases on flood resilience interventions, and then lead them through a system thinking exercise (using FCM and FRMC) to elicit their mental models representing important aspects of flood resilience and their interrelation. The aggregated mental models of stakeholders are used to identify the most beneficial resilience actions in terms of their direct and indirect impacts on flood resilience, based on the collective perceptions and knowledge of stakeholders. We apply this to the case of Lowestoft, a coastal town in England exposed to significant flood risk. Development in close collaboration with the local authorities the ambition is to support their decision-making on flood resilience interventions. We find that the combination of methods enables system-level thinking and inclusive decision-making about flood resilience which can ultimately encourage transformative decisions on prioritization of actions and investments.

There has been a big shift in corporate awareness of climate risks in recent years. While external pressure from investors and regulators to disclose and mitigate exposure of businesses to climate risks is increasing, many projected impacts are still hardly understood. This includes the risk of lock-ins in the face of increasing physical risks from climate change. Using the example of flood risk in England and Wales, the study looks at both the evidence and drivers of business lock-ins to physical risks from climate change. The paper adopts a multi-methods approach consisting of a summary of the empirical evidence of lock-ins in the literature, a case study analysis of current and future flood risk of recently completed business premises in England and Wales and the results of a survey among business owners in the UK. The findings show that business decisions made today, such as site selection or operational choices, can lock businesses to future risk trajectories that may be difficult and costly to change. Gaps between flood risk awareness and exposure in sectors such as manufacturing and finance were identified and attributed to low business capacity to understand site-level risk exposure and poor internal alignment between organisational actors. The results demonstrate that there is a business case for corporate risk assessment, disclosure and adaptation investments.

Cities are emerging as leading forces for climate change adaptation and resilience due to their financial, technological, and human capacities. Many approaches and tools have been developed and used over the last decades to measure climate resilience in cities and identify areas that need further intervention. In this study, we explore how and to what extent such tools can be or have been utilized by city-level actors to support their decision-making process for building climate resilience. To do this, we applied a document analysis of 27 tools developed for measuring urban climate resilience and supplemented it with 12 semi-structured interviews with local experts involved in implementation of these tools across the world. Our analysis shows that only 10 of these tools are designed to support implementing resilience actions while the rest mainly focus on sharing knowledge and raising awareness. We also observed a prevailing focus on evaluating coping capacities (as opposed to adaptive and transformative capacities) of cities against climate risks in such tools, which tends to trigger short-term solutions rather than long-term transformational adaptation strategies. Therefore, we argue that urban climate resilience measurement tools need to 1) support action implementation processes as much as assessing outcomes, and 2) consider the enabling environment for enhancing adaptive and transformative capacities as much as coping capacities of cities. Finally, we explore challenges and opportunities of resilience measurement practices for decision-making drawn from end-users’ insights.

The costs of disasters have been increasing in many parts of the world as a result of an increase in exposed and vulnerable assets as well as the effects of climate change. However, investments in disaster risk reduction (DRR)remain insufficient to manage these growing risks. To make investments in DRR more attractive and to shift investments from post-event response and recovery to pre-event resilience, there has been a push to account for the full range of benefits of those investments including economic, ecological and social ‘resilience dividends’. While the concept of ‘multiple resilience dividends’ is now frequently used to strengthen the DRR narrative, it has not yet been widely applied in practice when appraising DRR interventions. The paper analyses the knowledge gaps and challenges that arise from applying the ‘multiple resilience dividends’ in planning, implementation and evaluation of disaster risk reduction interventions on the community level. A newly developed framework is used to analyse empirical survey data on community level DRR interventions as well as five in-depth community case studies in Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the UK. The analysis reveals a disconnect between the available planning tools and the evidence on materialized multiple resilience dividends, which pose a key obstacle in successfully applying the concept on the community level. The paper concludes that a structured consideration of multiple dividends of resilience from the planning to the monitoring stage is important to secure local buy-in and to ensure that the full range of benefits can materialize.

We call for attention to climate change research as a domain of application for multiagent technologies. The multiagent nature of climate change challenges and successful application of multiagent methods in decentralized power grid systems, market organization, and industrial engineering, could improve our ability to address decarbonization (climate change mitigation) and to deal with some unavoidable consequences of global warming (climate change adaptation). We review major challenges to which the community of multiagent systems can contribute, highlight open research problems and argue for the application of multiagent models and solution concepts in a variety of issues related to this global challenge.

In March 2015, a new international blueprint for disaster risk reduction (DRR) was adopted in Sendai, Japan, at the end of the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR, 14-18 March 2015). We review and discuss the agreed commitments and targets, as well as the negotiation leading the Sendai Framework for DRR (SF-DRR) and discuss briefly its implication for the later UN-led negotiations on sustainable development goals and climate change.

In recent years, insurance against natural disasters has gained recognition as an important tool for climate risk management that could, if carefully implemented, help increase the resilience of those insured. In response, insurance solutions are increasingly tested and applied in many countries that have no prior experience with insurance or no existing market. This paper analyzes the status, types, and patterns of market-based disaster insurance schemes across emerging and developing countries in Asia. We provide a snapshot of the current use of insurance based on data from Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment's Disaster Risk Transfer Scheme Database (2012-2018). Our analysis shows that although the use of insurance is expanding, there are many countries that still don't have any kind of cover available. Where insurance mechanisms exist, they often rely on subsidies or bundling strategies. Although a mix of insurance schemes covering risks for governments (sovereign); or at meso (risk aggregators, cooperatives); and micro level currently operate to address a wide variety of climate and disaster risks, without demand-side support, many markets are likely to collapse or, at the very least, experience far lower penetration rates. We conclude with a discussion of the role of these insurance schemes in increasing resilience, which raises important questions for designing new and measuring and evaluating existing insurance schemes.