Linking Risk Reduction and Community Resilience

Risk reduction is a policy priority in governments at all levels. Building community resilience is one of the keys to reducing disaster risks. Resilience-focused risk reduction considers the wider social, political, and cultural environments of a community and emphasizes the importance of working with community members. This is in stark contrast to the previous vulnerability-focused risk management that treats disasters as unavoidable natural events and recognizes people as passive or helpless under the unavoidable disasters. Community resilience is a critical concept in identifying visions and directions for risk reduction strategies. Community resilience has two major qualities: inherent community conditions (inherent resilience) and the community’s adaptive capacity (adaptive resilience). There are at least four components that should be included in risk reduction strategies to enhance both inherent and adaptive community resilience: risk governance, community-based risk reduction policies, non-governmental disaster entrepreneurs, and people-centered risk reduction measures. Risk governance is required to bridge the gap between national policies and local practices, scientific knowledge of natural hazards and locally accumulated knowledge, and national assistance and local actions. Community-based risk reduction policies should complement national disaster policies to reflect locally specific patterns of hazard, exposure, and resilience that are otherwise ignored in policy design process at the international and national levels. Risk reduction strategies should also encourage emergence of non-governmental entrepreneurs who can contribute to the speed and success of community relief and recovery following a disaster by resolving the immediate needs of the affected communities and transitioning people toward autonomy and self-reliance. Finally, risk reduction strategies should include people-centered policy measures that are designed to change the awareness, attitudes, and behaviors of people so that they are more prepared when facing a disaster.