International society led by the United Nations has been working to improve and standardize every country's post-disaster recovery policy. In particular, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction adopted at the UN World Conference at Sendai, Japan, in 2015 declared the slogan "Build Back Better (BBB)." In this book, the BBB is considered an essential common criterion for evaluating recovery status, but BBB variations in each individual country's context are pursued. In contrast to a governmental approach to recovery evaluation focusing mainly on physical structures and macro indicators, this volume focuses more on the affected societies, communities, economies, and especially victims' livelihoods. The authors are academics from diverse fields, including governance, law, economics, and engineering, so that the book is truly interdisciplinary. This collection results from an international collaboration by scholars from "disaster-affected universities" in global-scale mega-disasters occurring in the Asian region in recent decades. The universities include Kobe University in Japan; Iwate University in Japan; Syiah Kuala University in Aceh, Indonesia; Sichuan University in China; and the University of the Philippines.

This book asks whether large-scale reconstruction can be participatory and developmental; can rebuilding be truly people-centred, contributing to breaking the cycle of poverty and dependence? Can reconstruction reduce people's vulnerability to disasters and other shocks?

This paper provides estimates of output multipliers for spending in clean energy and biodiversity conservation, as well as for spending on non-ecofriendly energy and land use activities. Using a new international dataset, we find that every dollar spent on key carbon-neutral or carbon-sink activities can generate more than a dollar’s worth of economic activity. Although not all green and non-ecofriendly expenditures in the dataset are strictly comparable due to data limitations, estimated multipliers associated with spending on renewable and fossil fuel energy investment are comparable, and the former (1.1-1.5) are larger than the latter (0.5-0.6) with over 90 percent probability. These findings survive several robustness checks and lend support to bottom-up analyses arguing that stabilizing climate and reversing biodiversity loss are not at odds with continuing economic advances.

"Critically examines the role of humanitarian aid and disaster reconstruction"--

This book calls for a bold forward-looking social policy that addresses continuing austerity, under-resourced organisations and a lack of social solidarity. Based on a research programme by the Webb Memorial Trust, a key theme is power which shows that the way forward is to increase people’s sense of agency in building the society that they want.

The annual Asian Development Outlook, now in its 30th year, analyzes economic performance in the past year and forecasts performance in the next 2 years for the 45 economies in Asia and the Pacific that make up developing Asia. Growth prospects in developing Asia remain strong despite persistent external headwinds responsible for moderating expansion since 2017. Global trade and economic activity weakened toward the end of 2018, slowing growth in many economies in the region. The outlook is cloudy with risks that tilt to the downside. A drawn-out trade conflict could undermine trade and investment in the region, and US fiscal policy and the consequences of a disorderly Brexit could weigh on growth in the advanced economies and the People's Republic of China. Though the risk of sharp increases in US interest rates has subsided, policy makers must stay vigilant. Disasters are shaped by natural hazards and the dynamics of the economy, society, and environment in which they occur. They pose a growing threat to development and prosperity in the region, their consequences disproportionately severe in developing countries, especially for the poor and marginalized. As developing Asia is home to more than four-fifths of the people affected by disasters globally in the past 2 decades, the region must strengthen its disaster resilience. This means integrating disaster risk reduction into national development and investment plans, spending more on prevention for a better balance with spending on rescue and recovery, and pooling risk through insurance and reinsurance.

The central theme of this book is national land and infrastructure design in the age of the declining population and the recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake in the affected regions in Japan. Based on the theory of spatial economics and evidence from Japanese history, the authors show that the growing economy with a population increase develops into a multi-cored and complex structure. In the population decline phase, however, such construction will be destabilized because of agglomeration economies in the central core. Then, a catastrophic shock that strikes may provoke the decline of the lower-rank-size provincial cities and their eventual disappearance if they compete only in lower prices of staple products. Not only is the practice bad for the residents; it also leads to lower national welfare resulting from the loss of diversity and overcrowded big cities. The authors argue that small local towns can recover and will be sustained if they will endeavor in innovative production by making good use of local natural resources and social capital. Under the ongoing declining population in Japan, an undesirable concentration in Tokyo will proceed further with increasing social cost and risk. The recent novel coronavirus pandemic has highlighted that concern.