Disaster resilience: What it is and how it can engender a meaningful change in development policy

Disasters pose a growing threat to sustainable development. Disaster risk management efforts have largely failed to arrest the underlying drivers of growing risk globally: uncontrolled urbanization and proliferation of assets in hazardous areas. Resilience provides an opportunity to confront the social-ecological foundations of risk and development; yet it has been vaguely conceptualized, without offering a concrete approach to operationalization. We propose a conceptualization of disaster resilience centred on wellbeing: ‘The ability of a system, community or society to pursue its social, ecological and economic development objectives, while managing its disaster risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way.’ We present a conceptual framework for understanding the interconnections between disasters and development, and outline how it is being operationalized in practice.