The Global Risks Alliance (GRA)
The cheapest disaster to finance is the one that causes less damage. Public investment in resilient infrastructure, building codes, land-use planning and early warning reduces the losses that later need financing. Getting there requires appraisal methods that count avoided losses and budgets that fund maintenance. This page sets out how resilience enters public investment, how it is measured, and who decides.
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Resilient public investment is public spending on infrastructure, codes, planning and warning designed to reduce future disaster losses. Appraisal that counts avoided losses, funded maintenance and careful siting decide its effect. Planning and finance ministries, infrastructure agencies and development banks hold the decisions.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Public investment and resilience · Sovereign C · Season 2
| Attachment | 63 | 0 | Close |
| Mid | 76 | 55 | Not met |
| Exhaustion | 92 | 100 | Not met |
local m, pre-arranged
Risk-sensitive budget and capital projects. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Standard cost-benefit appraisal often ignores disaster risk or counts only direct damage. Including avoided losses, disruption and co-benefits changes which projects rank highest.
New assets are funded; upkeep is not. Poorly maintained drains, embankments and roads fail in events they were designed to withstand.
Building in floodplains or on unstable slopes locks in risk for decades. Land-use rules and siting decisions shape future losses more than engineering alone.
Avoided losses do not appear in any account. Budget processes reward visible projects over prevention whose success is a disaster that did not happen.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Avoided losses | Damage and disruption that do not occur because of a risk reduction measure. |
| Benefit-cost ratio | The present value of a project's benefits divided by the present value of its costs. |
| Public investment management | The institutions and processes governments use to plan, appraise, select and deliver public investment. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public investment projects screened for disaster risk | share of approved projects | annual | Public investment management records | DECLARED |
| Maintenance spending on public infrastructure | currency and share of asset value | annual | Budget execution | OFFICIAL |
| Infrastructure assets in high-hazard zones | count or value | periodic | Asset registers and hazard maps | MODELLED |
| Benefit-cost ratio of risk reduction investments | ratio | per appraisal | Project appraisals | MODELLED |
| Building code adoption and enforcement | categorical | on change | National building regulations | OFFICIAL |
| Public investment management assessment scores | score by institution | on assessment | IMF PIMA reports | OFFICIAL |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| IMF Public Investment Management Assessments | Quality of public investment institutions including climate | Free, IMF terms |
| World Bank Lifelines report and resilient infrastructure work | Analysis of infrastructure disruption and resilience benefits | Free, World Bank terms |
| Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure reports | Infrastructure resilience practice and data | Free to read, terms to check |
| National Institute of Building Sciences mitigation saves studies | Benefit-cost analysis of hazard mitigation in the United States | Free to read, terms to check |
| OECD infrastructure resilience guidance | Policy guidance on resilient infrastructure | Free, OECD terms |
Disaster Risk Finance prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Planning and finance ministries | How appraisal rules treat disaster risk | Appraisal methods and comparable practice |
| Infrastructure agencies | Which assets to strengthen, maintain or relocate | Asset exposure and condition data |
| Local land-use authorities | Where development may proceed | Hazard maps and loss evidence |
| Development banks | Which resilience investments to finance | Benefit-cost evidence and country priorities |
Public investment management covers appraisal, selection, implementation and maintenance of capital projects. Disaster risk can enter at each stage: appraisal can include hazard exposure and avoided losses, selection can prioritize resilience, implementation can apply appropriate standards, and maintenance budgets can preserve performance. In practice, avoided losses are hard to see and easy to discount, while upfront costs are visible, so resilience is often under-funded.
Long-lived assets such as bridges, ports and hospitals will face hazard conditions that differ from those in historical records. Design approaches that consider a range of future climates, or that allow later upgrades, can reduce the risk of costly failure. Maintenance is frequently neglected in budgets, and deferred maintenance erodes resilience before a disaster reveals it.
Budget tagging, which identifies resilience and climate-related spending in budgets, helps governments see and manage these investments, though definitions vary.
Financing and investment interact. Governments that understand their contingent liabilities can see more clearly how resilience investment reduces future fiscal exposure, and some disaster finance arrangements reward or require risk reduction, linking ex ante investment with ex post protection.
Including avoided losses in project appraisal; results depend on hazard probabilities and discount rates.
Testing designs across many futures; demands data and expertise.
Identifying resilience spending in budgets; classification is partly subjective.
Limits: avoided losses are uncertain and hard to verify, and appraisal results are sensitive to assumptions about future hazards and discounting.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.