Pathways for adaptive and integrated disaster resilience

The world is experiencing a more frequent, deadly and costly disasters. The effects on social-ecological systems are increasingly uncertain and complex. Understanding these effects requires comprehensive, systematic and multi-disciplinary analyses. This paper proposes adaptive and integrated disaster resilience (AIDR), defined as the ability of communities or nations to build resilience (absorb, self-organise, and learn and adapt) to disasters in an integrated and systematic manner while simultaneously creating mechanisms to build adaptiveness. AIDR requires the ability of a social-ecological system to resolve some complex and uncertain problems systematically through creating redundancies through cross-sectors, cross-scale, multi-sources, diversified and innovative practices and providing mechanisms for systematic handling of risks. This is an interdisciplinary framework that links a number of concepts from different disciplines of natural hazards, ecology, climate change, environmental governance. It systematically analyses important factors and relationships between key concepts of resilience, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and adaptive governance. It is also a normative framework since it argues for AIDR as an ideal vision. We recommend seven pathways which represent strategies to bring the current DRR to be more integrated with climate change and development, and better equipped in facing complexities and uncertainties; (1) Placing community within the integrated DRR strategies climate change, development, (2) Polycentric governance system with multi-stakeholder participation which can accelerate support at the local or community level, (3) Cross-sectors and multi-stakeholders collaborations to identify emergent problems and integrates policy processes, (4) Comprehensive and systematic assessment of knowledge and information around hazard, risks and their impacts, (5) Mechanisms that allow for institutional learning from the implemented policies and experiences, (6) Self-organisation / network at the community level, (7) diversifications of risk finance both with private and public instruments.