Community resilience to natural hazards and climate change: a review of definitions and operational frameworks

Natural hazards and climate change is increasingly acknowledged as one of important global challenges. Thus vulnerable communities urgently need to build their resilience. This paper addresses two aims: first is to examine how resilience is defined and interpreted in the context of natural hazards, second is to document and analyse experiences in operationalising them, to advance resilience theory. We contend that a comprehensive framework needs to incorporate elements of sustainable development, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and community engagement. It also needs to go beyond specifying the outcomes, to describing process by which resilience can be improved. We call this ‘ a multi-tiered approach for resilience: important outcomes and processes’. There are five out of twelve frameworks that comprehensively meet these requirements. They are Climate Resilient Cities of the World Bank, Hyogo Framework for Action of UN/ISDR, Coastal Community Resilience of US/IOTWS, Community and Safety Resilience of IFRC and Characteristics of Disaster Resilient Community of Twigg/DFID. The frameworks are reported to positively promote learning, participation and enable comprehensive overviews of resilience status and DRR efforts. Some challenges remaining include how to create indicators and enabling environments that reflect local conditions, to ensure sustainability, and to reduce reliance on data and information.