Climate extremes and longer‐term climate change impacts threaten the achievement of development goals (Damania et al., 2017; IBRD, 2018). In 2030, up to 319 million extremely poor people will be living in the 45 countries most exposed to floods, droughts and heat extremes (Shepherd et al., 2013). According to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on 1.5°C global warming, a 2°C increase in temperature will double1 the number of people exposed to drought through water stress (IPCC, 2018). To eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, development cooperation and domestic action in the developing world is increasingly concerned with building resilience to these climate hazards (SDG Goal 1.5).

Amid lively critical debates, the resilience‐building agenda has sparked a proliferation of projects in recent years. Resilience programmes are being implemented in some of the most climate‐vulnerable, institutionally fragile and unstable settings around the world. Often, they focus on improving people's access to climate and weather information, resources or markets, helping them plan ahead and navigate environmental change and uncertainty in the future. Importantly, resilience‐building is anticipated to give greater agency to vulnerable people and produce more co‐benefits or ‘dividends’ than conventional international development approaches (Rodin, 2014; Tanner et al., 2015a, 2015b; Bond et al., 2017; Cabot Venton, 2018; Cabot Venton et al., 2012).

Building resilience from the ground up is critical because of the context‐specific nature of climate change and disaster impacts and the need to ensure the engagement of vulnerable groups. The five‐year, £100m UK Department for International Development (DFID) programme on Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) is one example of this intervention logic. Alongside the implementation of 15 projects in 13 countries, research and monitoring and evaluation, knowledge‐sharing activities that have taken place under BRACED present a unique opportunity to learn about how poor people and communities deal with climate shocks and other hazards in different contexts, their vulnerabilities and the kinds of interventions that can help strengthen their resilience. Similarly, the Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme funded by DFID for five years to provide technical and financial support to governments across five South Asian countries had a lesson‐learning function to share experiences and knowledge across the programme and with the outside world.

This special issue of Disasters reflects on resilience‐building supported via BRACED and ACT in some of the world's most climate‐vulnerable countries and contexts. These programmes have focused on scaling up action to build resilience, 2 principally through the expansion and replication of good practices by influencing government policies, plans and investments.