The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.

Building resilience -- the ability to bounce back more quickly and effectively -- is an urgent social and economic issue. Our interconnected world is susceptible to sudden and dramatic shocks and stresses: a cyber-attack, a new strain of virus, a structural failure, a violent storm, a civil disturbance, an economic blow. Through an astonishing range of stories, Judith Rodin shows how people, organizations, businesses, communities, and cities have developed resilience in the face of otherwise catastrophic challenges: Medellin, Colombia, was once the drug and murder capital of South America. Now it's host to international conferences and an emerging vacation destination. Tulsa, Oklahoma, cracked the code of rapid urban development in a floodplain. Airbnb, Toyota, Ikea, Coca-Cola, and other companies have realized the value of reducing vulnerabilities and potential threats to customers, employees, and their bottom line. In the Mau Forest of Kenya, bottom-up solutions are critical for dealing with climate change, environmental degradation, and displacement of locals. Following Superstorm Sandy, the Rockaway Surf Club in New York played a vital role in distributing emergency supplies. As we grow more adept at managing disruption and more skilled at resilience-building, Rodin reveals how we are able to create and take advantage of new economic and social opportunities that offer us the capacity to recover after catastrophes and grow strong in times of relative calm.

The present report was informed by the work of the Intergovernmental Working Group on Drought under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and its holistic approach with the other Rio Conventions, as well as the international sustainable development and disaster risk reduction communities. The publication builds on a recent review of drought risk mitigation, preparedness and response measures commissioned by FAO with partners in the Integrated Drought Management Programme, alongside a range of other recent global reviews, and the work of the Intergovernmental Working Group of the UNCCD on drought. The report presents an overview of current knowledge and thinking concerning the effectiveness of three distinct layers of financing that set out to address drought risks in different ways. For each of these, results are conceptualized and measured in different ways for disaster risk reduction, adaptation to climate change, and transformative green finance. There is not yet any coherent global system to generate an overview of progress and gaps at the global level, nor to orient public policies and learning processes within the affected countries. This initial review explores how these gaps could be filled. It also takes a first step toward doing so by bringing together insights from the current available systems for targeting and tracking financing to address drought risks through the three layers of actions, target indicators and evidence systems.

Investing in Resilience: Ensuring a Disaster-Resistant Future focuses on the steps required to ensure that investment in disaster resilience happens and that it occurs as an integral, systematic part of development. At-risk communities in Asia and the Pacific can apply a wide range of policy, capacity, and investment instruments and mechanisms to ensure that disaster risk is properly assessed, disaster risk is reduced, and residual risk is well managed. Yet, real progress in strengthening resilience has been slow to date and natural hazards continue to cause significant loss of life, damage, and disruption in the region, undermining inclusive, sustainable development. Investing in Resilience offers an approach and ideas for reflection on how to achieve disaster resilience. It does not prescribe specific courses of action but rather establishes a vision of a resilient future. It stresses the interconnectedness and complementarity of possible actions to achieve disaster resilience across a wide range of development policies, plans, legislation, sectors, and themes. The vision shows how resilience can be accomplished through the coordinated action of governments and their development partners in the private sector, civil society, and the international community. The vision encourages “investors” to identify and prioritize bundles of actions that collectively can realize that vision of resilience, breaking away from the current tendency to pursue disparate and fragmented disaster risk management measures that frequently trip and fall at unforeseen hurdles. Investing in Resilience aims to move the disaster risk reduction debate beyond rhetoric and to help channel commitments into investment, incentives, funding, and practical action

Universal basic income (UBI) is emerging as one of the most hotly debated issues in development and social protection policy. But what are the features of UBI? What is it meant to achieve? How do we know, and what don’t we know, about its performance? What does it take to implement it in practice? Drawing from global evidence, literature, and survey data, this volume provides a framework to elucidate issues and trade-offs in UBI with a view to help inform choices around its appropriateness and feasibility in different contexts. Specifically, the book examines how UBI differs from or complements other social assistance programs in terms of objectives, coverage, incidence, adequacy, incentives, effects on poverty and inequality, financing, political economy, and implementation. It also reviews past and current country experiences, surveys the full range of existing policy proposals, provides original results from micro†“tax benefit simulations, and sets out a range of considerations around the analytics and practice of UBI.

Financial Soundness Indicators (FSIs) are measures that indicate the current financial health and soundness of a country's financial institutions, and their corporate and household counterparts. FSIs include both aggregated individual institution data and indicators that are representative of the markets in which the financial institutions operate. FSIs are calculated and disseminated for the purpose of supporting macroprudential analysis--the assessment and surveillance of the strengths and vulnerabilities of financial systems--with a view to strengthening financial stability and limiting the likelihood of financial crises. Financial Soundness Indicators: Compilation Guide is intended to give guidance on the concepts, sources, and compilation and dissemination techniques underlying FSIs; to encourage the use and cross-country comparison of these data; and, thereby, to support national and international surveillance of financial systems.