Disaster Resilience: Generic Overview and Pakistan Context

Abstract

AbstractThe concept of resilience has been widely used in the disaster risk reduction perspective. Disaster resilience is the capacity to prepare, respond and recover from the impacts of disasters. Building disaster resilience dealt with proofing, adaptation and mitigation. It improves one’s ability to minimise the effects of adverse events. Disaster risk management ensure the risk reduction, enhance resilience, in addition to building effective response and recovery mechanism. The United Nations Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA): Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disaster is the agreed framework for making the world safer from the impacts of disasters and building resilience.In Pakistan, the earthquake of 2005 was an eye opening natural event, which particularly highlighted the country vulnerability to various risks. This has shifted the Government approach towards more proactive and as a consequence national disaster management ordinance, national disaster management authority was established as a focus body to chalk out national DRR agenda. In the country, there are certain key challenges in building disaster resilience including exposure to hazard events, low level of risk awareness, low level of development risk conscious, absence of multi-hazard risk assessment, lack of mainstreaming DRR in policies and plans and poor DRR capacity in the context of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery. This chapter discusses the concept and evolution of disaster resilience, various dimensions, indicators, linkages of disaster resilience and environmental system, disaster resilience and sustainability, disaster resilience and climate risk. The chapter also highlighted the disaster risk reduction legislations and resilience issues in Pakistan. Finally, the chapter focuses on how to build disaster resilience at various levels and promote adaptive strategies.KeywordsResilienceCapacityVulnerabilityBuilding resilienceAdaptive capacity