Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

To inform investment decisions for the future, the Fiji Government worked with the World Bank to develop the country's first ever Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA) to quantify and better understand the threat posed by natural hazards and climate change and to help design climate adaptation and risk management plans. The CVA paved the way for responding to short-term needs while boosting long-term sustainability and resilience. This applies directly to the COVID-19 crisis as the CVA provides a means to assess current, and candidate interventions that could be successful for sustainable economic recovery from COVID-19. Consider how a CVA could be used to:

• Co-opt government programs related to resilience into stimulus measures e.g. national development plans, infrastructure masterplans, or resilience plans already identify interventions that can be cross-checked against a sustainability checklist to determine relevant COVID-19 interventions that address both short and long term needs
• Determine locale-specific priorities for economic stimuli that account for local risks and needs. This may include accelerating interventions that are already expected to be delivered, expanding interventions already underway, or prioritizing interventions that are cross-sectoral e.g. improving agricultural productivity, the reliability of infrastructure, or by reducing energy
• Identify additional economic stimulus, generated from various resilience-building interventions, that could be used to mitigate the economic shocks imposed by the pandemic