Gall, M., S. L. Cutter, and K. Nguyen (2014). Incentives for Disaster Risk Management (IRDR AIRDR Publication No. 2). Beijing: Integrated Research on Disaster Risk.
This literature review summarises our current scientific knowledge on incentives for disaster risk management: how it has evolved over the past decades, what we know about incentives, their influence on disaster risk reduction, and where the research gaps are in our present knowledge. This overview builds on the efforts by the IRDR working group on the Assessment of Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (AIRDR) to provide the science-based evidence for the development of the post-2015 Hyogo Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (IRDR 2013).
Three key policy questions are addressed in this review:
- Are disaster risk mitigation and prevention still seen primarily as a cost and not an investment?
- Are the corrective, prospective, and compensatory aspects of disaster risk management not well understood and as a result emphasis is still placed on high-cost, corrective and compencompensatory schemes and approaches as opposed to proactive, lower cost actions thus the cost-benefit calculation more difficult to bear?
- Can incentives be identified that may constitute tipping points for behavioural change towards prospective disaster risk management and risk-sensitive choices at a significant scale thereby increasing the political, social and economic saliency of disaster risk management?