The costs of disasters have been rising in many parts of the world due to an increase in exposed and vulnerable assets as well as the effects of climate change, including changing weather patterns and sea level rise. Investments in disaster risk reduction (DRR) remain insufficient to manage these growing risks. To make DRR investments 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’.

However, the concept of ‘multiple resilience dividends’ is not yet widely applied in practice. This paper analyses the knowledge gaps and challenges that arise from applying ‘multiple resilience dividends’ in the planning, implementation and evaluation of disaster risk reduction interventions at the community level.

The authors’ analysis of community-level DRR interventions and five in-depth community case studies, from Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the UK, reveals a disconnect between the available planning tools and the evidence on materialised multiple resilience dividends. This disconnect poses a key obstacle in successfully applying the concept at the community level. The authors conclude 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 materialise.