Introduction How do people deal with difficult events that change their lives? The death of a loved one, loss of a job, serious illness, terrorist attacks and other traumatic events: these are all examples of very challenging life experiences. Many people react to such circumstances with a flood of strong emotions and a sense of uncertainty. Yet people generally adapt well over time to life-changing situations and stressful conditions. What enables them to do so? It involves resilience, an ongoing process that requires time and effort and engages people in taking a number of steps. This brochure is intended to help readers with taking their own road to resilience. The information within describes resilience and some factors that affect how people deal with hardship. Much of the brochure focuses on developing and using a personal strategy for enhancing resilience.

https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/bitstream/123456789/19457/1/Think%2018%20-%20A11.pdf

Road to resilience

Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: The Search for a Value of Place THOMAS POWER ISLAND PRESS, WASHINGTON, DC, 1996 295 PP. $35.00 HARDCOVER While this book is firmly based in the rhetoric of academic economics, Powers local economies and popular folklore makes it an excellent text for economic anthropology. Specifically he focuses on the ways in which folklore expresses local economic decision making wisdom with regards to environmental resources. These issues are brought to life through descriptive ethnography of the diversity of political and economic interests in American extractive industries. But this work is not merely descriptive. Power advocates the demystification of two competing modes of thought in local economic behavior. One is the ideological bias of academic economic science that assumes absolute truth. The other is the uncritical bias of naive folk economics that mistrusts expertise external to local communities. This demystification is motivated by his objective of helping local people better understand how they make their decisions so that local economic policies are neither misled nor distorted. Three basic assumptions inform his arguments in the body of the book: 1) popular folk economies that assume natural resource extraction industries are critical to economic development are incomplete and misleading; 2) contrary to popular belief people seek high-quality residential environments over economic opportunities; and 3) business development follows labor, not vice versa. Environmental economic issues (i.e., agriculture, ranching, fishing, mining, and logging) are primarily rural in context, where folk wisdom persists in political and economic decision-making. These extractive activities are centers of economic and environmental conflicts. Power argues that it may be more productive to view these conflicts from the perspective of scientific vs. folk economics rather than as political interest group conflicts. This new perspective, I think, is his main contribution to economic anthropology and environmental scholarship. According to Power, the various interests representing extractive industries and environmental protection are often deadlocked. He proposes a different framework for engaging in civil discourse to examine local realities. Scientific economics can be employed to demystify the significance of the role of extractive industries at local levels. In most cases, argues Power, that role is not as significant as many locals assume. Scientific economics can also identity the significance of protected landscapes on local economies. In most cases protected areas and ecotourism contribute much more to economic vitality than is locally believed. Power argues that it is peoples commitment to local environments that influences local economic agendas. Therefore, environmental protection is not only central to economic decision making, but the most central resources in the local economic base. …

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Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: The Search for a Value of Place

For a city to perform successfully, and its citizens to feel safe and comfortable, the health of basic urban components and the overall resilience of the urban system is crucial. As the importance of the resilient urban system has been recognized in the scientific literature, many studies have been done on this topic. Therefore, to find out the gaps in the existing literature and the opportunities for further research, a new systematic literature review has been performed in three stages. Different bibliographic techniques (co-occurrence and co-citation analysis) have been applied and, in the final stage of the analysis, an in-depth study of the content of the selected papers addressing open space in relation to urban seismic resilience has been carried out. The obtained results and trends have shown a lack of research on the potential of open space for enhancing urban seismic resilience, as well as a challenge for its quantitative assessment. The ability of the affected resilient system is to achieve at least a pre-disaster performance level in an acceptable time, which can be gained, among others, by using the restorative potential of open space. Based on the synthesis of these findings the authors’ draft model of an urban system integrating the potential of open space is presented in terms of a complex network theory.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/21/5942/pdf

The potential of open space for enhancing urban seismic resilience : a literature review

Building disaster resilience is a stated goal of disaster risk reduction programs. Recent research emphasizes a need for a greater understanding of community disaster response and recovery capacity so that communities can absorb shocks and withstand severe conditions and progress through the recovery period more efficiently. Nepal, which is prone to a multitude of hazards and having recently experienced a large earthquake in 2015, provides a unique opportunity for exploring disaster resilience in the developing world context. To date, no study investigating community disaster resilience across the entire country of Nepal exists. This study quantifies disaster resilience at Nepal's village level, primarily using census data. Guided by the Disaster Resilience of Place (DROP) model, 22 variables were selected as indicators of social, economic, community, infrastructure, and environmental resilience. Community resilience was assessed for 3971 village development communities (VDCs) and municipalities while using a principal component analysis. Additionally, a cluster analysis was performed to distinguish spatial patterns of resilience. Analyses reveal differential community disaster resilience across the country. Communities in the capital city Kathmandu and in the western and far western Hill are relatively resilient. While the entire Tarai region, which holds the greatest proportion of Nepal's population, exhibits relatively low levels of resilience when compared to the rest of the county. The results from this analysis provide empirical evidence with the potential to help decision-makers in the allocation of scarce resources to increase resilience at the local level.

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/6/1985/pdf

Benchmarking Community Disaster Resilience in Nepal.

Engaging volunteer tourism in post-disaster recovery in Nepal.

The ability of a community to withstand and recover from adversities including natural and man-made disasters has emerged as a major policy issue in recent years. This research aims to assess the role of institutional initiatives in building resilient communities and their response to natural disasters like the Gorkha earthquake in Nepal in 2015. The work is based on data collected from primary and secondary sources along with field observations. It is evident that resilient communities are equipped with greater coping capacities in the face of natural disasters and have reduced vulnerability to future hazards. Institutional capacity building and resilient construction including the School Earthquake Safety Program ensured better disaster preparedness. The traditional open spaces and building designs added to the structural resilience. There is, however, a need to build back better and to communicate earthquake-resistant designs to the affected communities.

Bhaswati Ray

Papers

Response of a Resilient Community to Natural Disasters: The Gorkha Earthquake in Nepal, 2015