Social and ecological vulnerability to disasters and outcomes of any particular extreme event are influenced by buildup or erosion of resilience both before and after disasters occur. Resilient social-ecological systems incorporate diverse mechanisms for living with, and learning from, change and unexpected shocks. Disaster management requires multilevel governance systems that can enhance the capacity to cope with uncertainty and surprise by mobilizing diverse sources of resilience.

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Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters

The intimate connections between disaster recovery by and the resilience of affected communities have become common features of disaster risk reduction programmes since the adoption of The Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015. Increasing attention is now paid to the capacity of disaster-affected communities to 'bounce back' or to recover with little or no external assistance following a disaster. This highlights the need for a change in the disaster risk reduction work culture, with stronger emphasis being put on resilience rather than just need or vulnerability. However, varied conceptualisations of resilience pose new philosophical challenges. Yet achieving a consensus on the concept remains a test for disaster research and scholarship. This paper reviews the concept in terms of definitional issues, the role of vulnerability in resilience discourse and its meaning, and the differences between vulnerability and resilience. It concludes with some of the more immediately apparent implications of resilience thinking for the way we view and prepare for disasters.

The concept of resilience revisited.

Social Vulnerability to Climate Change and Extremes in Coastal Vietnam

Losses from environmental hazards have escalated in the past decade, prompting a reorientation of emergency management systems away from simple postevent response. There is a noticeable change in p...

Revealing the Vulnerability of People and Places: A Case Study of Georgetown County, South Carolina

Naomi Klein's international bestseller This Changes Everything is a must-read on our future, one of the defining and most hopeful books of this era. Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better. Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes a book that redefines its era. No Logo did so for globalization. The Shock Doctrine changed the way we think about austerity. In This Changes Everything, her most provocative and optimistic book yet, Naomi Klein has upended the debate about the stormy era already upon us, exposing the myths that are clouding the climate debate. You have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. You have been told it's impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it - it just requires breaking every rule in the "free-market" play book. You have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring. It's about changing the world, before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap - or we sink. This Changes Everything is a book that will redefine our era. "The most important book I've read all year - perhaps in a decade...crucially, she leaves the reader with a sense of optimism." (Stephanie Merritt, Observer, Books of the Year). "A book of such ambition and consequence it is almost unreviewable...The most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring." (Rob Nixon, The New York Times). "Naomi is like a great doctor - she can diagnose problems nobody else sees." (Alfonso Cuaron). "Damn right, this changes everything...one of the greatest non fiction works of all time...not just a book. It is a path of survival." (D. R. Tucker, Washington Monthly).

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Phil O'Keefe, Ken Westgate and Ben Wisner argue the case that disasters are more a consequence of socio-economic than natural factors.

Ken Westgate

Papers

Taking the naturalness out of natural disasters

Global systems and local disasters: the untapped power of peoples' science.

Land-Use Planning, Vulnerability and the Low-Income Dwelling

Preventive planning for disasters