Two worldwide trends in recent decades are commonly noted and sometimes linked in discussing disasters. First, the reported global cost of natural disasters has risen significantly, with a 14-fold increase between the 1950s and 1990s ( Munich Re, 1999 ). During the 1990s, major natural...

This paper makes the case for why safety nets are an important tool for managing the risk of natural hazards. The use of safety nets is advocated both ex ante, to prevent and mitigate the impact of natural disaster and ex post, to cope with the impacts of natural shocks. Firstly, the paper...

As the human and financial costs of disasters rise, there are increasing demands for evidence that mitigation “pays”. Until this proof exists, many development organisations remain reluctant to pursue risk reduction as a key objective, or even to protect their own projects against potential...